Kids opening up to their robot toys may help detect mental health issues before parents can spot them
Fortune September 1, 2022
A robot might be better than parents at detecting mental well-being issues in children.
That’s according to a team of roboticists, computer scientists, and psychiatrists from the University of Cambridge who found children were more willing to confide to a child-sized humanoid robot on the state of their mental well-being than to questionnaires given online or in person.
As part of the study, researchers gave 28 child participants, aged eight to 13, a child-sized humanoid robot that asked them a series of questions about their mental well-being. The robot asked open-ended questions about happy and sad memories and administered several questionnaires that measured mood and mental health.