Emotional and Behavioural Distraction by a Social Robot for Children Anxiety Reduction During Vaccination

Social Assistive Robots are starting to be widely used for paediatric health-care. In this setting, the development of effective strategies to engage and remain compelling during the interaction is still an open research area since, in the case of an incoming medical procedure, children could be in an anxiety state. In this work, the proposed strategy relies on the use of a social robot interacting with the children and applying distraction strategies that are used in human–human interaction. Additionally, the robot displays emotional behaviours to attract the children attention. We present the results of a 2 months study (N = 139) conducted in a Health-Vaccines Centre, where the effects of the distraction provided by a social robot, showing such interactive behaviours interleaved with emotional ones, are compared with the same distracting strategies without any emotional social cues and with the case without the robot. Such emotional behaviours are selected with a positive or negative valence according to the initial anxiety state of the children (e.g., low or high). Outcome criteria for the evaluation of the intervention included the parents reported fear, anxiety and happiness at different stages of the interaction, self-report of the perceived pain, and an external behavioural evaluation of the pain. Results showed that the robot distraction strategies were able to reduce fear and anxiety, and increase happiness in every condition. Moreover, children perceived less pain with respect to the case of no robot. Finally, results showed that the initial children anxiety has an impact on the ability of the robot to be engaging.