Socially assistive robots represent a promising tool in assistive contexts for improving people's quality of life and well-being through social, emotional, cognitive, and physical support. However, the effectiveness of interactions heavily relies on …
Frailty assessment plays a pivotal role in providing older adults care. However, the current process is time-consuming and only measures patients’ completion time for each test. This paper introduces a set of algorithms to be used in robots to …
As robots become more integrated in human spaces, it is increasingly important for them to explain their decisions. These explanations need to be generated automatically in response to decisions taken in dynamic, unstructured environments. However, …
The ability to impact the attitudes and behaviours of others is a key aspect of human-human interaction. The same capability is a desideratum in human-robot interaction when it can have an impact on healthy behaviours. The robot’s interaction style …
The outbreak of Covid-19 precipitated the use of service robots in customer-facing services as a replacement for employees to avoid human-to-human contact. However, this development has not resolved the debate as to whether robots should be …
Enabling a robot to perform new tasks is a complex endeavor, usually beyond the reach of non-technical users. For this reason, research efforts that aim at empowering end-users to teach robots new abilities using intuitive modes of interaction are …
In the future, robots are expected to autonomously interact and/or collaborate with humans, who will increase the uncertainty during the execution of tasks, provoking online adaptations of robots’ plans. Hence, trustworthy robots must be able to …
The ability to install social intelligence protocols in robots in order for them to exhibit conversational skills has made them ideal tools for delivering services with a high cognitive and low emotional load. Little is known about how this …
In recent years, in response to the effects of Covid-19, there has been an increase in the use of social robots in service organisations, as well as in the number of interactions between consumers and robots. However, it is not clear how consumers …
The social ability of humans to provide active feedback during conversations is known as backchannelling. Recent work has recognised the importance of endowing robots with such social behaviour to make interactions more natural. Nonetheless, very …