ABSTRACT

This award supports project EMAR (Ecological Momentary Assessment Robot), a timely interdisciplinary project that will research, develop, and deploy a user-friendly social robot that gathers teen mental health data in a public high school setting. Existing research only provides evidence for the benefits of human-robot-interaction among young children and adults; investigating the interactions between teens and robots has been largely overlooked. Such an investigation is needed since adolescents are very likely to have long-lasting relationships with robots in the future at work, in the classroom, and at home. It also needed especially since adolescents constitute a vulnerable population that is negatively affected by stress and mental health issues, and since there are well-established difficulties in gathering accurate, useful, mental health data from teens in their natural environment with digital surveys and experience sampling using static data collection tools including computers, tablets, and smart phones. The success of this project will contribute to the development of ubiquitous social robots that serve as tools for on-site, real time data collection. Such tools would improve research methodology and facilitate evidence-based decisions in real time. In addition, this interdisciplinary, community-based project will serve to achieve societally relevant outcomes by broadening participation and engaging both undergraduate and high school students, including those who are traditionally underrepresented in STEM. The results of this project will be disseminated widely using pertinent means for reaching researchers, practitioners, community partners, and schools.

The project has two key objectives: To design and develop an engaging social robot to capture real-time stress and mood data from teens, and to successfully deploy and evaluate the social robot in an urban, high school setting. As school populations increase, and mental health services decrease, gathering valid, real-time data via engaging technology may be an essential tool for assessing student health. Using a human-centered design approach, the project employs participatory methods to engage local teens directly in the design and testing of the robot. The project will utilize interdisciplinary investigations of teen-robot interactions, teen-centric iterative design, and the social impact of deployment; in doing so, it will acquire valuable and much needed information to understand the relationship between teens and robots as well as the potential impact of a social robot as a data gathering device. It will also facilitate assessing the feasibility of using a robot to gather real-time data for aggregation into visual data that would serve to inform decision-making and evaluation of interventions; such an ability would be especially useful in school environments where teens need more support. The results of this study will contribute and serve to advance the field of robotics as well as the fields of adolescent health and research methodology. They will also contribute to understanding the specific relationship between teens and robots, which is an imperative for this generation's future success.

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