Design of Form and Motion of a Robot Aimed to Provide Emotional Support for Pediatric Walking Rehabilitation

In Japan, increasing number of elderly who need care and shrinking workforce has driven the introduction of robotic technology for medical and nursing-care tasks. Despite the emergence of robots that provide physiological and mental care, in the walking rehabilitation field, this research could not find a robot that offers emotional support to patients, who usually experience stress, worry and anxiety during therapy due to pain and tiredness. In this paper, we present the design of a robot aimed to provide emotional support to children attending walking rehabilitation, essentially by "cheering" them during therapy. We first assessed walking rehabilitation procedures and summarized a general outline of a typical rehabilitation therapy. Then, we investigated the positive and negative emotions that children experience during each step of the rehabilitation therapy outline, and proposed roles that the robot must fulfill to deal with those emotions. Based on the established emotional roles, the robot morphology, design and motion were concurrently defined. The central design intention is to create a robot with a simple morphology and abstract form (less anthropomorphic or biomorphic) that is soft, gentle and characterized by not having face features. Two prototypes were built and prelaminar evaluations were performed with adult respondents, including healthcare professionals. The overall impressions of the robot design, motion and effectiveness was favorably evaluated, and validation with pediatric patients will be implemented as a next step.