Socially assistive child-robot interaction in physical exercise coaching

The main contribution of this thesis is the design and implementation of an autonomous socially assistive human robot interaction system to engage children in performing several physical exercise motions by providing real-time feedback, guidance, and encouragement. Preliminary offline tests were done within a rehabilitation therapy context but since the potential of the system to encourage such exercise activities is beyond the physical therapy fields, we designed an online system to behave as an exercise coach that can motivate children to start and continue improving their health and become physically active. The online system was tested in several preliminary experiments with an exercise coach and children during the design process. Furthermore, an experimental study was conducted with 19 healthy children aged between 4 and 12 to test the feasibility and the effectiveness of our online Socially Assistive Robotic (SAR) exercise system across a variety of performance and evaluation measures. The results of the study validate the effectiveness of the system in motivating and helping children to complete physical exercises. The children engaged in physical ex- ercise throughout the interaction sessions with a robot coach and rated the interaction highly in terms of enjoyableness, and rated the robot exercise coach highly in terms of social attraction, social presence, and companionship via a questionnaire answered after each session.