Effects of off-activity talk in human-robot interaction with diabetic children

This paper presents the results from an experiment with a conversational human-robot interaction system aimed at long-term support for diabetic children. The system offers a set of activities aimed to help a child to improve its capability to manage diabetes. There is a large body of literature on the techniques that artificial agents can use to establish and maintain long-term social-emotional relationships with their users. The novel aspect in the present study is the inclusion of off-activity talk interspersed within talk pertaining the activity at hand and aimed to elicit the child´s self-disclosure. The children in our study (N=20, age 11-14) were more interested to have another session with the robot when their interaction included also off-activity talk, even though there was no difference in the perception of the robot by the children between the groups with and without off-activity talk. Furthermore, individual interactions with the robot positively influenced the children´s adherence to a therapy-related requirement, namely the filling in of a nutritional diary.