Emotional Distraction for Children Anxiety Reduction During Vaccination

TL;DR

This study investigates how social assistive robots with emotional cues can help reduce anxiety in children during vaccinations, comparing emotional versus non-emotional interactions based on parent-reported anxiety levels.

Contribution

It provides initial empirical evidence on the effectiveness of emotionally expressive social robots in pediatric healthcare settings for anxiety reduction.

Findings

Emotional social robots significantly lowered children's anxiety levels.

Parents reported decreased anxiety during robot interaction with emotional cues.

The study supports integrating emotional social cues in robotic interventions for children.

Abstract

Social assistive robots are starting to be widely used in pediatric health-care environments with the aim of distracting and entertaining children, and so of reducing a possible state of anxiety. In this paper, we present some initial results of a study (N=69) conducted in a Health-Vaccines Center, where the distraction role of a social robot, which interacts with a child showing an emotional behavior, is compared with the same not showing any emotional social cue. Outcome criteria for the evaluation of the intervention included the parents reported level of anxiety before, during and after the procedure.