Published on
Updated
Reading 3 mins.
in collaboration with
Dr Gérald Kierzek (Medical Director of Doctissimo)
The detection of mental health disorders, especially among the youngest, is a necessity. For this, work is regularly carried out in this field and a study shows that social assistance robots could potentially serve as diagnostic tools in children.
Mental health has been one of the major concerns of recent years, due in particular to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the entire population and in particular on the youngest.
A study by researchers at the University of Cambridge sheds light on the possibility of using social assistance robots to diagnose pathologies related to mental health.
A questionnaire/robot comparison
To reach this conclusion, the researchers selected 28 English children aged 8 to 13. Among the participants, there were 21 girls and 7 boys, whose average age was 9 and a half years. Furthermore, children who had already been diagnosed with neurological or psychological disorders were excluded from the research. First, the participants answered about their well-being on an online questionnaire. In parallel, the parents or guardians of the children answered a questionnaire on their well-being as well.
In addition, the children spent 45 minutes in the company of a robot called Nao. The latter administered a questionnaire to assess their symptoms of depression and asked the children about their happy or sad memories of the past week.
More “reliable” robots
The researchers, whose work was presented at the IEEE 2022 International Conference on Robots and Human Interactive Communication, held in Naples last June, found that questionnaires conducted by robots were more likely to identify instances of well-being abnormalities than children’s online self-reports or parent or guardian statements.
Indeed, some participants shared information with the robot that they did not share in the questionnaire. For Professor Hatice Gunes, professor of affective intelligence and robotics at the University of Cambridge, “we have a robot that looks like a child and has a childish voice. In such situations, children actually see the robot more as a peer. So it’s not an adult trying to extract information from them.
Interesting results
For Dr. Joachim Müllner, psychiatrist at the Hotel-Dieu in Paris, the study is interesting.
“As surprising as it may seem, it has indeed been shown that robots could also be useful in psychiatry, whereas one might think that this is an area where social interactions with a human are essential. Yes, they are and they basically remain so, but for specific tasks such as helping to get in touch with a particularly suspicious child, for example. The robot can have the advantage of looking like a toy, of looking harmless, nice. Our brain is probably less parasitized by all the emotional and intentional decoding of this robot which faces us”.
Hard to imagine in routine
“So it can help for mediation, for getting in touch with a child, or here for a first collection of data, but the fact remains that for the moment the use of robots does not make sense. only for very specific situations and is light years away from being able to replace the richness and finesse of contact with a human” recalls Dr. Müllner, who also considers it difficult to routinely set up this type of equipment expensive which raises the question of the protection of the health data of its users.