Health Counseling by Robots: Modalities for Breastfeeding Promotion Conversational humanoid robots are being increasingly used for health education and counseling. Prior research provides mixed indications regarding the best modalities to use for these systems, including user inputs spanning completely constrained multiple choice options vs. unconstrained speech, and embodiments of humanoid robots vs. virtual agents, especially for potentially sensitive health topics such as breastfeeding. We report results from an experiment comparing five different interface modalities, finding that all result in significant increases in user knowledge and intent to adhere to recommendations, with few differences among them. Users are equally satisfied with constrained (multiple choice) touch screen input and unconstrained speech input, but are relatively unsatisfied with constrained speech input. Women find conversational robots are an effective, safe, and nonjudgmental medium for obtaining information about breastfeeding.

A Social RobotBased Platform for Prevention of Childhood Obesity Childhood obesity is a major public health concern since it is associated with obesity during adulthood and the occurrence of diseases such as diabetes and cancer. In this paper we present a platform for childhood obesity prevention, which is based on interactive games played between a social robot and the child. The interactions between the robot and the child occur within four distinct stages: a) Familiarization with the robot, b) education and knowledge assessment (e.g., for a balanced diet), c) behavioural data collection u0026 empowerment, and d) personalized goalsetting. The platform was evaluated in terms of usability with 10 participants achieving a System Usability Score (SUS) of 93.8. Overall, our results show the feasibility of the adopted approach and the potential of social robots in playing a major role for promoting healthy behaviours and preventing childhood obesity.