Teleoperated robot coaching for mindfulness training: A longitudinal study

Social robots are becoming incorporated in daily human lives, assisting in the promotion of the physical and mental wellbeing of individuals. To investigate the design and use of social robots for delivering mindfulness training, we develop a teleoperation framework that enables an experienced Human Coach (HC) to conduct mindfulness training sessions virtually, by replicating their upper-body and head movements onto the Pepper robot, in real-time. Pepper’s vision is mapped onto a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) worn by the HC and a bidirectional audio pipeline is set up, enabling the HC to communicate with the participants through the robot. To evaluate the participants’ perceptions of the teleoperated Robot Coach (RC), we study the interactions between a group of participants and the RC over 5 weeks and compare these with another group of participants interacting directly with the HC. Growth modelling analysis of this longitudinal data shows that the HC ratings are consistently greater than 4 (on a scale of 15) for all aspects while an increase is witnessed in the RC ratings over the weeks, for the Robot Motion and Conversation dimensions. Mindfulness training delivered by both types of coaching evokes positive responses from the participants across all the sessions, with the HC rated significantly higher than the RC on Animacy, Likeability and Perceived Intelligence. Participants’ personality traits such as Conscientiousness and Neuroticism are found to influence their perception of the RC. These findings enable an understanding of the differences between the perceptions of HC and RC delivering mindfulness training, and provide insights towards the development of robot coaches for improving the psychological wellbeing of individuals