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Social Assistive Robots: Assessing the Impact of a Training Assistant Robot in Cardiac Rehabilitation

International Journal of Social Robotics volume 13, pages 1189–1203 (2021)Cite this article

Abstract

According to the world health organization, cardiovascular diseases are a major cause of death worldwide. Cardiac rehabilitation programmes are dedicated to approach this problem and reduce mortality rates due to the presence of a second event. However, the adherence and motivation of patients to assist to these programmes is not the expected. Therefore, this paper presents the incorporation of a SAR system into a cardiac rehabilitation scenario, where a social robot had the role of a training assistant during the therapy, aiming to increase motivation and encourage people to continue with the therapy. This study carried out a longitudinal experimental setup with a total of 209 sessions observed for a group of 6 patients in a period between 3 and 6 months. Results show that patients felt more encouraged to perform physical activity and continue with the rehabilitation when they perceived that monitored and supervised by the system, demonstrating that it can be implemented as a reliable tool that would potentially leverage tasks carried out by health professionals.

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Notes

  1. http://doc.aldebaran.com/2-1/naoqi/audio/alanimatedspeech.html.

  2. The phrases presented here are translated from Spanish, which is the language used by the robot during the therapy.

  3. Duration of the phase II might differ between patients, according to their physiological condition

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Funding

This work was supported in part by the Royal Academy of Engineering IAPP project Human–Robot Interaction Strategies for Rehabilitation based on Socially Assistive Robotics (Grant IAPP/1516/137), the EU H2020 MSC ITN project APRIL (Grant 674868), the EU FP7 project DREAM (Grant 611391) and Colciencias (Grant 813-2017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA

    Jonathan Casas

  2. Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Emmanuel Senft

  3. Fundación Cardioinfantil-Instituto de Cardiología, Bogota, Colombia

    Luisa F. Gutiérrez & Mónica Rincón-Rocancio

  4. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Colombian School of Engineering Julio Garavito, Bogota, Colombia

    Marcela Múnera & Carlos A. Cifuentes

  5. IDLab - imec, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Tony Belpaeme

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  1. Jonathan Casas
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  2. Emmanuel Senft
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Correspondence to Carlos A. Cifuentes.

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Casas, J., Senft, E., Gutiérrez, L.F. et al. Social Assistive Robots: Assessing the Impact of a Training Assistant Robot in Cardiac Rehabilitation. Int J of Soc Robotics 13, 1189–1203 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-020-00708-y

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Keywords

  • Socially assistive robotics
  • Human–robot interaction
  • Cardiac rehab
  • Robot-based therapy