Abstract
Recent research demonstrated the benefits of employing robots as therapeutic assistants and caregivers, but very little is known on the use of robots as a tool for psychological assessment. Socially capable robots can provide many advantages to diagnostic practice: engage people, guarantee standardized administration and assessor neutrality, perform automatic recording of subject behaviors for further analysis by practitioners. In this paper, we present a pilot study on testing people’s cognitive functioning via social interaction with a humanoid robot. To this end, we programmed a social robot to administer a psychometric tool for detecting Mild Cognitive Impairment, a risk factor for dementia, implementing the first prototype of robotic assistant for mass screening of elderly population. Finally, we present a pilot test of the robotic procedure with healthy adults that show promising results of the robotic test, also compared to its traditional paper version.
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Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully thank all university staff and students who participated in this study. The work was supported by the European Union’s H2020 research and innovation program under the MSCA-Individual Fellowship grant agreement no. 703489.
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Varrasi, S., Di Nuovo, S., Conti, D., Di Nuovo, A. (2019). Social Robots as Psychometric Tools for Cognitive Assessment: A Pilot Test. In: Ficuciello, F., Ruggiero, F., Finzi, A. (eds) Human Friendly Robotics. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89327-3_8
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