Using AI-Enhanced Social Robots to Improve Children's Healthcare Experiences

UKRI/ESRC, 2020-2025

My main current project is "Using AI-Enhanced Social Robots to Improve Children's Healthcare Experiences", a project funded in 2020 through the Canada-UK Artificial Intelligence Initiative. This five-year project is exploring the use of social robots to help children cope with potentially painful and distressing healthcare situations. The project partners are:

Here is an article from the University of Glasgow News site with more details about the project.

Relevant publications

Lindsay, A., Ramirez-Duque, A., Foster, M. E. and Petrick, R. (2024) A Socially Assistive Robot using Automated Planning in a Paediatric Clinical Setting. In: 2024 International Symposium on Technological Advances in Human-Robot Interaction, Boulder, CO, USA, 09-10 Mar 2024, (Accepted for Publication)

Lindsay, A., Ramirez-Duque, A. A., Foster, M. E. and Petrick, R. P. A. (2024) Using AI Planning for Managing Affective States in Social Robotics. In: 19th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2024), Boulder, Colorado, USA, 11-15 March 2024, (Accepted for Publication)

Ramirez-Duque, A. A., Lindsay, A., Foster, M. E. and Petrick, R. P. A. (2023) A Lightweight Artificial Cognition Model for Socio-Affective Human-Robot Interaction. In: 19th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2024), Boulder, Colorado, USA, 11-15 March 2024, (Accepted for Publication)

Hudson, S., Nishat, F., Ali, S., Litwin, S., Wiles, B., Foster, M. E. and Stinson, J. (2023) Qualitative Needs Assessment of Child and Caregiver Perspectives to Inform Design of an Artificial Intelligence-enhanced Social Robot to Improve Paediatric Emergency Care. 2023 Annual Conference of the Canadian Paediatric Society, Halifax, Canada, 25-27 May 2023. ISBN 1205-7088 (doi: 10.1093/pch/pxad055.077)

Hudson, S., Nishat, F., Stinson, J., Litwin, S., Zeller, F., Wiles, B., Foster, M. E. and Ali, S. (2023) Perspectives of healthcare providers to inform the design of an AI-enhanced social robot in the pediatric emergency department. Children, 10(9), 1511. (doi: 10.3390/children10091511) (PMID:37761472) (PMCID:PMC10529269)

Nishat, F., Hudson, S., Panesar, P., Ali, S., Litwin, S., Zeller, F., Candelaria, P., Foster, M. E. and Stinson, J. (2023) Exploring the needs of children and caregivers to inform design of an artificial intelligence-enhanced social robot in the pediatric emergency department. Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, 7(1), e191. (doi: 10.1017/cts.2023.608) (PMID:37745926) (PMCID:PMC10514688)

Foster, M. E. et al. (2023) Co-design of a Social Robot for Distraction in the Paediatric Emergency Department. In: 18th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI2023), Stockholm, Sweden, 13-16 March 2023, pp. 461-465. ISBN 9781450399708 (doi: 10.1145/3568294.3580127)

Ramírez, A. and Foster, M. E. (2023) A Whisper ROS Wrapper to Enable Automatic Speech Recognition in Embedded Systems. Human-Robot Conversational Interaction (HRCI), Stockholm, Sweden, 13 Mar 2023.

Lindsay, A., Ramirez-Duque, A., Petrick, R. P.A. and Foster, M. E. (2022) A Socially Assistive Robot using Automated Planning in a Paediatric Clinical Setting. In: AAAI Fall Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction (AI-HRI 2022), Arlington, VA, USA, 17-19 November 2022, (doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2210.09753) 

Foster, M. E. , Ali, S., Litwin, S., Parker, J., Petrick, R. P. A., Smith, D. H., Stinson, J. and Zeller, F. (2020) Using AI-Enhanced Social Robots to Improve Children's Healthcare Experiences. In: The 12th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2020), 14-16 Nov 2020, ISBN 9783030620554