A Gamified Interaction with a Humanoid Robot to explain Therapeutic Procedures in Pediatric Asthma

In chronic diseases, obtaining a correct diagnosis and providing the most appropriate treatments often is not enough to guarantee an improvement of the clinical condition of a patient. Poor adherence to medical prescriptions constitutes one of the main causes preventing achievement of therapeutic goals. This is generally true especially for certain diseases and specific target patients, such as children. An engaging and entertaining technology can be exploited in support of clinical practices to achieve better health outcomes. Our assumption is that a gamified session with a humanoid robot, compared to the usual methodologies for therapeutic education, can be more incisive in learning the correct inhalation procedure in children affected by asthma. In this perspective, we describe an interactive module implemented on the Pepper robotic platform. Pepper is equipped with a tablet that is particularly suitable for this kind of activity. The module has been designed to catch children’s attention and describe the main steps of the procedure in an amusing way. The verbal description of the steps is accompanied by music and the visualization of appropriate images in the Pepper tablet. The description is also enriched with suitable gestures and expressiveness, to obtain a better engagement and at the same time boost the learning process. A chatbot-based dialogue component is used by Pepper to manage interaction with children. We designed two activities. The first one consists in the explanation of the procedure through a succession of scenes, where each scene represents the description of one single step of the procedure. To avoid an information overload and at the same time simplify the explanation, we have summarized the procedure in four steps, also defining a simple acronym to help the child to memorize them. The interaction is in the Italian language. The second activity consists in a game. In the game the four steps are shown in the tablet in the wrong order. On the left side of the tablet the first four numbers are shown, while the right side depicts the images corresponding to the four possible steps. The child has to assign the correct figure to each of the four numbers on the left. The child interacts with Pepper by talking and touching the tablet in order to sort the steps correctly. For each step, the robot gives feedback to the child, inviting him or her to try again if he or she has made a mistake. The game ends when all the steps have been associated to a number by the patient. Pepper gives further feedback to the child showing the score obtained in the game.