I’m co-organizing a workshop at the upcoming ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2019) this 11th of March in Daegu, Korea. Join us for a full-day workshop on Social Robots in Therapy and Care.Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has successfully been used in Human Robot Interaction (HRI) research by including social robots in health-care interventions by virtue of their ability to engage human users in both social and emotional dimensions. Robots used for these tasks must be designed with several user groups in mind, including both individuals receiving therapy and care professionals responsible for the treatment. These robots must also be able to perceive their context of use, recognize human actions and intentions, and follow the therapeutic goals to perform meaningful and personalized treatment. Effective interactions require for robots to be capable of coordinated, timely behavior in response to social cues. This means being able to estimate and predict levels of engagement, attention, intentionality and emotional state during human-robot interactions. An additional challenge for social robots in therapy and care is the wide range of needs and conditions the different users can have during their interventions, even if they may share the same pathologies their current requirements and the objectives of their therapies can varied extensively. Therefore, it becomes crucial for robots to adapt their behaviors and interaction scenario to the specific needs, preferences and requirements of the patients they interact with. This personalization should be considered in terms of the robot behavior and the intervention scenario and must reflect the needs, preferences and requirements of the user.

The second iteration of this workshop builds on the success of the previous version hosted at the 13th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. This time, we continue the discussion on approaches and challenges of developing these social robots and discuss recent advances and research contributions on HRI in RAT and social robot care.

We will have an interesting program featuring 10 participants interventions and 5 invited speakers: Tom Ziemke, Yukie Nagai, Cindy Bethel, Ho Seok Ahn and Takayuki Kanda. Check out the program on our website. Planning to be in Daegu for the Human-Robot Interaction Conference? Come be part of the workshop!