1 Introduction
Health and wellbeing technologies have great potential in supporting people’s health and increasing their quality of life and independence. However, for these technologies to become successful, they need to meet individuals’ needs and care context [
20]. Health technologies have a variety of target users, including children and adults with specific physical or mental health conditions, older adults who might need physical or cognitive support for living independently for longer, or more generally healthy adults, to maintain their health and wellbeing. Health technologies can be programmed to provide a wide range of support, such as treatment, assessment, diagnosis, follow-up, monitoring, and social and mental health support. Examples are technologies designed for health monitoring [
135], delivering positive psychology (e.g., inducing positive emotions and fostering psychological wellbeing) [
24], providing companionship [
19], or supporting people with specific conditions such as dementia [
102]. These technological solutions have used multiple platforms such as mobile or Web-based applications, smart home sensors, wearables, and robots.
Among these health technologies, social robots (i.e., robots that
“are designed to interact with people in a natural, interpersonal manner” [
26, p. 1935]) have seen increasing attention in the literature over the past decades, in part due to the advantages they have over other types of technologies. For example, social robots have a physical presence, the ability to interact with people on a social level, and can be programmed to adapt to individuals and deliver support in an adaptive and interpersonal manner. They are non-judgmental (unless programmed to act otherwise), which can be especially important in some contexts, for example, for providing mental health support to those who might initially avoid therapy [
119]. While social robots have seen a lot of attention in some contexts, such as supporting people with autism [
107], older adults with depression [
31], or older adults with dementia [
55], they have great potential to support a larger range of user groups with different health conditions and needs.
Therefore, it is informative to understand the contexts in which social robots have been currently studied, and to identify the existing gaps that can be addressed by future work. In this article, we provide a large-scale review of the literature on using social robots for supporting people’s health and wellbeing. We ask about the application areas, types of studies, and types of robots and robot autonomy that have been used in the existing studies, where study participants (adult participants over 18 years old) actually interacted with the robots.
We have a long-term vision of a “Personal healthcare journey,” where in future a robotic platform can be programmed with different functionalities to assist adults in different stages of their lives and for different needs, such as remaining healthy, support during hospitalization and recovery, and supporting independent living. This journey envisions different stages of individuals’ health needs in life, ranging from when they are healthy and can use a social robot’s support for maintaining health/wellbeing, to when they may require constant health monitoring and support during or after hospitalization. Although robotic platforms always change and improve, being exposed to one at earlier stages of life might facilitate using social robots in daily life throughout one’s life. This motivated us to also investigate different contexts and settings where the studies have been conducted with a view of “Personal healthcare journey” stages, as well as different social robotic platforms that have been used in the studies and in real-world settings. This article provides a comprehensive review of the existing literature, identifies existing gaps, and provides directions for future work in using social robots for supporting people’s health and wellbeing, with the goal of informing future research in this area.
1.1 Related Review Articles
In this section we provide a summary of the existing reviews that are related to this review to present the existing findings and emphasize the novelty of this review.
Recently, Santos et al. (2021) systematically mapped the literature relating to robotics and human care [
128]. This was the most inclusive review found as the study included social, assistive, and service robots as well as robotic sensors and used a broad definition of human care. Sixty-nine studies were included and from these, the authors identified main categories, sub-categories, and topics to sort the literature into meaningful areas. In the context of human care, the main categories included communication, entertainment, monitoring, therapy, tutor, object manipulation, and personal assistant [
128].
A variety of other reviews exist on the general topic of social robots and health and wellbeing, but many of the reviews found during this investigation limit their scope to specific patient populations. A recent systematic review of social robots used in hospital settings included 61 studies and concluded that children and older adults are the largest populations to receive these interventions in healthcare, although some interventions are focused on addressing specific diseases [
57]. Even agnostic of settings, older adults are a commonly reviewed population for within this topic [
8,
9,
10,
54,
64,
69,
73,
139,
147]. Closely related to the reviews on older adult populations are those that involve people with dementia. A 2021 systematic review included 53 articles to study how social robots have been used for supporting people with dementia, with a focus on social and emotional capabilities of the robots. The review suggested that social robots have been majorly used in the context of therapy and for increasing engagement of people with dementia with other people such us family, carers, and other patients. However, social robots that provide health-related advice or support with daily activities, as well as long-term studies have seen limited attention [
55]. Taking a slightly different approach, a 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis included 66 articles to study which social robots have been used for supporting people with dementia and their impact [
157]. This review characterized
Socially Assistive Robot (SAR) (see [
90]) interventions by robot type and looked for evidence that these are positively perceived, feasible, and effective methods for addressing symptoms of dementia. The results led the authors to conclude that these could be feasible interventions accepted by patients and caregivers, but there are challenges with ease of use. They also noted that the effectiveness of SARs is still unknown due to the lack of high-quality study design [
157]. Differing conclusions were noted in another 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis which found SARs to be an effective intervention, significantly improving cognitive function in the nine included studies [
80]. A similar systematic review and meta-analysis, which included 18 articles, concluded that while social robots can improve social connections and ease agitation for people with dementia, more research is needed to improve their effectiveness [
99]. Evidence for reduced agitation in people with dementia was also found in another 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis, which included seven articles [
85]. The need for more research was echoed in a third 2021 study which was a scoping review based on 53 papers [
75]. Here, the authors noted that technical complexity, cost, and physical accessibility barriers will need to be addressed for social robots to be seen as feasible interventions.
Other reviews focus on SARs as mental health or psychological wellbeing interventions more broadly. A 2018 systematic review addressed this topic by focusing on studies with adult population and empirical design [
131]. Twelve studies were included in the review and the authors noted that most investigated robots provided companionship, and only three studies involved participants in the 18–45 age range. The authors concluded that animal-like social robots may provide positive outcomes for persons with dementia living in care homes, but could not generalize to other populations. A similarly broad 2019 systematic review investigated the use of social robots for improving health and wellbeing, and only included randomized controlled trials [
124]. Populations addressed in the 27 included studies fell into one of three groups: children with autism spectrum disorder, children without autism spectrum disorder, and older adults. The review concluded that the methodological quality of the studies varied and that while all the studies found some positive effects in their social robot interventions, many also reported no effect, or areas where the alternative treatment was more beneficial, and some even found negative effects on participants. A scoping review in this area which used a quality assessment tool on their included studies found only one strong study while the rest were rated moderate (10) or weak (19) [
61]. One last systematic review noted that most social robots were used to provide comfort and companionship as a mental health intervention rather than focus on addressing specific symptoms or disorders [
121]. Here, the authors also noted the study participants as being mainly older adults or children.
Another approach, taken by four reviews, was to focus on the perspectives of non-patients who interacted with the robots. A 2019 review of patents for robots used in nursing care found that there is an increasing number of robots being developed for nursing [
52]. Fifty-five robotic patents, including social robots, were identified for a range of nursing specialties/types of nurses. Studies eliciting the opinions of nurses and care workers on the use of SARs in patient care were identified in a 2018 review [
104]. Nineteen studies were included and the article concluded that views were generally mixed, but slightly more positive than negative. There also seemed to be generally more acceptance of robots for task-based and monitoring activities, and there did not seem to be any indication of worry of robots replacing these workers [
104]. A 2021 study looking at the ethics of social robots in nursing care [
56] identified a need for a regulatory framework if robots are going to be integrated more fully into nursing practice. Another review focused on formal caregivers in care homes [
129]. This study included eight articles and provided recommendations on robot design, policy, and implementation plans.
Five other reviews focused on the robots themselves. A 2020 scoping review investigated studies examining the role that personality plays in
Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) for embodied robots in a healthcare context [
49]. Eighteen studies were included and the article discussed how personality traits of humans and robots impact humans’ acceptance and perceptions of the robot, as well as the robots’ performance and social/emotional abilities. Two reviews on the NAO robot focused on studies that used this social robot in an intervention in any setting. The Robaczewski et al. (2021) study included 70 articles and found that the robot was used in a variety of roles, broadly including companion, empathetic device, physical/motivational assistant, teacher, and support for people with dementia or intellectual disability [
122]. The Amirova et al. (2021) study included 288 articles and found that the robot often filled the role of peer, learner, tutor, mediator, or assistant [
7]. The Telenoid [
93] and PARO [
150] robots have also been reviewed, with both studies suggesting that more randomized controlled trials and real-world usage is needed.
Many other reviews were found to be related but had minimal reporting on social robots by identifying SARs as just one type of intervention for improving health or supporting wellbeing. Eight reviews included different types of robots [
18,
43,
47,
94,
97,
117,
155,
160]. Six reviews included social robots as one type of artificial intelligence enabled intervention [
37,
40,
79,
84,
87,
141]. Another 14 reviews included studies that used any information and communications technology intervention, including social robots [
13,
28,
30,
33,
34,
35,
53,
66,
78,
89,
98,
142,
143,
159]. One more reviewed study addressed loneliness due to COVID-19 using any method, including social robots but also other, non-technical, interventions [
151].
Lastly, 24 related narrative reviews were identified where authors provided overviews through a number of different lenses. These included broad overviews of robotics systems without a sociable interactive component [
74,
112], reviewing social robots based on application [
32,
39,
65,
113,
115,
118,
133,
149,
153] or based on application and form [
11,
17,
45,
62,
71,
76,
96,
110,
114,
127,
156]. Two more reviews investigated the technology and materials used in care robots [
6,
106], and one review described a specific SAR, ARI [
38]. As these overviews were narrative reviews, and did not detail their methodologies for selecting and reviewing the existing literature [
58], these publications are not considered to be scoping or systematic reviews.
During the time that this article was under review, newer systematic reviews on social robots in health have been published but, to our knowledge, none of them still provides as comprehensive a picture as this one. While using similar inclusion/exclusion criteria, they included significantly fewer studies. This could be due to a limited use of keywords [
83], searching fewer databases [
116], or a different approach to quality assessment [
68].
Other recent reviews published during this time focused on specific populations such as older adults [
50,
154], people with dementia [
59,
67,
157], and people with autism [
126,
146]. This further highlights the significance of our wide-ranging work.
1.2 Motivation and Research Questions (RQs)
The existing reviews presented above were identified through rigorous preliminary searching. The lack of a comprehensive review that involved social robots and adult participants in healthcare led us to conclude that a large-scale systematic review would be beneficial to inform the development of social robots for supporting health and wellbeing. The goal of this work and the RQs are to address this gap in the review literature, through identifying a range of factors that are important for success of social robots in healthcare, such as the settings robots have been evaluated in, the social robots that have been used, and the application areas.
Therefore, this article expands on existing reviews to include a large-scale systematic review of a total of 443 studies that involved social robots and adult participants in health/wellbeing contexts, regardless of setting, social robots used, or health/wellbeing condition addressed, to inform the development of social robots for people with different health conditions and needs and in different settings and stages of life. Specifically, the review addresses the following RQs:
—
RQ1: In which settings have the studies with social robots been conducted?
—
RQ2: Which robots have been used and what are their capabilities and functions?
—
RQ3: What are the different stages of “Personal healthcare journey” (see our definition below) in which social robots can be used in the context of health and wellbeing (e.g., at home to promote wellbeing, in hospitals to support patients, at home for recovery)
—
RQ4: What are the user populations and their health conditions in those studies?
—
RQ5: How did the participants interact with social robots in the reviewed articles, and what types of data (i.e., qualitative and/or quantitative) were collected?
—
RQ6: What commercial social robots were developed and used in real-world settings to promote health and wellbeing, and what are their capabilities and contexts of use?
RQ1 through RQ5 are addressed through our systematic review (initial data collected on 6 February 2021). This method was chosen as it requires a comprehensive search and detailed synthesis of the published literature and will allow us to provide a detailed picture of what is known [
58]. RQ2 is also addressed by finding information about the different functionalities of the robots used in the studies (in many cases this information needed to be extracted from another source, such as social robots’ Web sites, if this information was not provided in the related articles). RQ3 is addressed by proposing to view the reviewed articles through the lens of a “Personal healthcare journey,” where we will discuss a timeline and settings in which the social robots can be used in people’s Personal healthcare journeys to improve health and wellbeing.
To address RQ6, a modified grey literature search is conducted between May and December 2021 to identify the different contexts in which commercial social robots are currently used in real-world settings (e.g., hospitals, patients’ homes) to promote health and wellbeing. Finally, we addressed RQ6 by also referring to the articles selected for the review, as well as the additional information gathered on these robots.
2 Methodology
In this section, we will first explain our terminologies and discuss the methodology related to the systematic review. Afterward, we will explain the methodology of the performed grey literature search to identify commercial social robots used in real-world settings in the context of health/wellbeing, as well as the methodology for extracting information about the social robots.
2.1 Terminology
Robot. For the purpose of this review, we adopt the definition of
robot provided in another review article [
55], i.e., we consider a system as a
robot if (a) it has physical embodiment (i.e., having a 3D physical body), and (b) it can move or act upon its environment, even if the movements/actions are very limited.
Social Robot. We define a
social robot as a robot with social skills, which (a) has been designed to operate alongside people and to interact in human-centric terms [
42,
26], and (b) is capable of engaging with people in an interpersonal manner and use verbal, non-verbal, or affective modalities to coordinate its behavior and communicate with people [
26].
Health and Wellbeing Promotion. We rely on the existing definitions of health and wellbeing. Health is defined as “the extent to which an individual or group is able, on the one hand, to realize aspirations and satisfy needs and, on the other hand, to cope with the interpersonal, social, biological and physical environments” [
137]. “Health may be conceptualized as the capability to react to all kinds of environmental events having the desired emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses and avoiding those undesirable ones” [
82]. Wellness is defined as “the optimal state of health of individuals and groups” [
134].
2.2 Systematic Review
The methodology used for this review follows the guidance provided by the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination and included identification of the RQ(s) and inclusion criteria, finding relevant research, selecting studies, extracting the data, and synthesizing and disseminating the findings [
51]. PRISMA provides a similar direction for a systematic review methodology. The PRISMA 2020 guidelines were used to report our methods and results [
103]. The finding relevant research phase of the review occurred in 2021 (the database searches were run on 6 February and grey literature searches were conducted between May and December) so anything published after this time is not included in the review.
2.2.1 Eligibility Criteria.
We included peer-reviewed articles published at a conference or in a journal. The search was restricted to publications written in English (due to the time, expenses and effort required for translating non-English articles), and was not restricted based on the year of the study.
As the focus of this study is on social robots used and evaluated in the context of health/wellbeing, we only included studies where a social robot had been used and evaluated through studies with participants in a context related to health and wellbeing, and reported on related outcomes. To focus this review, we only considered studies that involved adult participants.
Studies with only children as participants were not included in this review. Social robots have been evaluated with children in many domains, especially, social robots for supporting children with autism has seen a high attention in the literature, with many reviews summering those findings [
14,
48,
92]. In this review, we excluded studies that only had children as participants for multiple reasons: (a) it helped us focus the scope of the review, and not to repeat some of the existing reviews such as [
14,
48,
92,
145]. As suggested by the number of papers included in these reviews, including children would have added over 100 articles to the review, which would have significantly affected the feasibility and timeline of the present review. (b) It is well known that social robots for supporting children with autism have received most attention in the literature; however, the application areas that received most attention for adults are not clear from the past work. (c) Our long-term goal (as will be discussed in the Personal Health Journey Section) is to propose a robot that can act as a health companion throughout one’s life and provide support in different stages of their health. Although childhood is a part of this journey, robots designed and used for children may require very different considerations than those made for adults (e.g., safety, privacy). Therefore, this review only includes papers that had adult participants.
2.2.2 Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria.
To address our RQs, we had to focus our search on studies that (a) used a social robot, that was (b) evaluated in the context of health and wellbeing, and (c) reported results that were also related to this context.
Our inclusion criteria were as follows:
—
Studies with adult participants (18+ years old)
—
Studies published in peer-reviewed conferences or journals
—
Studies that involved participants who engaged with or evaluated a social robot in the context of health and wellbeing
—
Studies on the use of social robots for a health or a wellbeing intervention, with related outcomes/evaluations
—
Studies on the use of physically embodied robots, and robots that possess social skills, i.e., those that are considered social robots based on our definitions above
—
Studies reported in English
Our exclusion criteria were:
—
Studies on the use of a purely robotic device (exoskeleton, sensors, artificial limbs, etc.) without social attributes
—
Studies on the use of robots in healthcare, where the robots did not exhibit a social behavior (i.e., where the robot was not being operated/programmed to act as a social robot according to our above-mentioned definition)
—
Studies with only children as participants
—
Studies reported in a language other than English
—
Studies that were not included in a conference proceeding or a journal (e.g., book chapters, technical reports)
—
Studies that did not have any results related to health/wellbeing as defined above (e.g., studies that only evaluated general attitudes toward or acceptance of social robots without interactions with a robot or without considering a health context)
As the same robot may or may not be used as a social robot, we clearly followed the definition of social robots given above. For example, if a tele-presence robot was only used by a person to approach and talk with another person (where the voice and video of the person controlling it were demonstrated) and the robot did not show any social behaviors itself, those studies were excluded. However, if the tele-presence robot was capable of getting involved in basic conversations (e.g., having its unique voice), or even showed emotions and non-verbal behaviors, then it was considered a social robot and the related studies were included.
As another example, if interactions with the robot were not evaluated in the context of health/wellbeing, e.g., if the study was used to only measure general attitudes toward or acceptance of the robot, or if only the performance of a specific aspect of the robot was evaluated (e.g., object recognition), then the study was excluded. However, if the study measured and reported any results that would be related to the context of health and wellbeing (as defined above), then it was included.
Lastly, we did not exclude papers based on their length. While we focused on peer-reviewed publications, even an extended abstract which was published in a conference proceeding was included.
2.2.3 Information Sources.
Due to the multi-disciplinary nature of this topic and to be comprehensive with the search, we selected five databases. MEDLINE via PubMed and PsycInfo via APA PsycNet were selected to cover the literature on health/wellbeing, and IEEE Xplore Digital Library and the ACM Digital Library were selected to cover the literature on social robots. Lastly, Scopus was included as a multi-disciplinary database, indexing articles in both domains. We did not use Google Scholar because of its low precision and limited searching functionalities [
23]. We also identified a list of journals and conferences that are likely to publish articles relevant to our review, to ensure that they were indexed in at least one of these five databases. The number of relevant results led to time constraints that prevented citation searching and handsearching.
2.2.4 Search Strategy.
The search terms and strategies were created with the direct involvement of a librarian in computer science with extensive systematic search experience and the strategies were checked by librarians in other areas (e.g., a librarian with a background in health who was outside the research team). The main concepts of the search were identified from the RQs and the search terms were defined according to the study’s inclusion criteria and RQs. The search strategy was first created for PubMed and was then adjusted according to the other databases’ functionalities.
The main concepts searched in PubMed’s MEDLINE were social AND robot. Because the other databases had a large amount of literature devoted to the development of social robots as well as social robots for use outside of health and wellbeing, the concepts of participant AND health were added to increase the precision of the search.
To define the search terms, we followed an iterative process to ensure that we capture different keywords and vocabulary used by different authors in both social robotics and health domains. This process enabled us to be comprehensive while reducing the amount of irrelevant articles [
41,
109]. After multiple iterations where different keywords were checked for their precision and recall of relevant articles, the search terms were defined for each database. The full search strategies are shown in
Table A1 in the
Appendix.
The ability to search the full text in IEEE and ACM (for a large portion of the records they index) allowed us to increase the recall of the searches by searching for the concept of social robots in the full text as well as the title/abstract/keywords. This was done in acknowledgement that some authors do not describe the robot or specific methods in their abstracts. The concept of health was also searched in IEEE Xplore’s full text and metadata field for cases where authors do not describe in the abstract the context in which the robot is being used. Unfortunately, searching the health concept in the full-text field in the ACM Digital library returned thousands of irrelevant papers (because the ACM DL’s full-text search includes searching articles’ references), so this concept was limited to the title/abstract/keywords fields in ACM DL.
Including names of social robots in the search was considered because there are some studies that use the brand name of a well-known robot without describing the robot. However, most of these results would likely be captured in the databases with full-text search-ability and creating a complete list was not feasible, so robot names were not included in the search.
The final searches were run on 6 February 2021, covering articles added to the databases prior to this date. A total of 11,338 results were exported from the five research databases to RefWorks [
2], the reference management system. A total of 1,932 duplicates were removed and 9,406 records were then imported into Covidence, which identified a further 44 duplicates; 9,362 unique articles were made available for title and abstract screening in Covidence [
1].
2.2.5 Selection Process.
Five of the authors and a collaborator participated in the screening process. Each of the 9,362 identified articles was reviewed in duplicate by two authors for the title and abstract screening. In case of disagreement, the articles were checked by at least two additional team members to determine whether they would pass the title and abstract screening. A total of 8,623 articles were excluded in this step while 739 articles passed the title and abstract screening’s criteria and moved on to the full-text screening stage.
Full text screening was performed by individuals, but they were also checked again at the data extraction step (in case an article was passed by error and did not meet the inclusion criteria). This process resulted in 445 articles to be included in the review.
Figure 1 summarizes the screening process. Below is a description of what each exclusion means in the diagram:
—
No robot or social robot: The articles did not have any robot, or a social robot as defined above.
—
No user studies: The article did not have user studies, or did not report on the participant groups. For example, it only mentioned a study with people, without reporting demographics or other information that would allow us to check who the user groups were. In some cases, there were proposals about a user study with no results (e.g., one to be completed in the future).
—
Not health/wellbeing as defined: The study either (1) was not related to health or wellbeing, or (2) the robot was designed for a health and wellbeing context but was not evaluated in this context. For example, although the robot was designed to be used in a health/wellbeing related context, the study only evaluated the performance of a specific machine learning algorithm used in the robot.
—
No interaction with the user: The participants did not interact with the robot. For example, it was an online survey or a video study (e.g., participants only saw videos or photos of a robot, or were not given any specific illustration of a robot).
—
Review article: The article presented a review of the literature.
—
No adult population: The article did not involve adult participants.
—
Not English: The article was written in a language other than English.
—
Not in conference proceeding or journals: The article was from a source that was not in our inclusion criteria (e.g., the work was presented at a workshop and was not included in the conference proceedings).
—
Repeated: Eight repeated articles were not automatically detected and were manually removed at this step.
2.2.6 Data Charting.
Through multiple iterations including all members of the research team, a data charting form was developed. The data charting was tested by five team members and revised in meetings with the other members of the research team, until it was finalized after multiple iterations.
The data presented in the included articles were extracted into the chart by individual team members. Due to time constraints and the number of included studies obtaining missing data or verifying data was not possible. When a study had multiple associated papers the appropriate data points were added to the chart and in the event that conflicting information was identified the newest data was used.
2.2.7 Data Analysis Processes.
Due to the number of studies and variety of study designs included in the results we were unable to perform a meta-analysis or data synthesis to determine effect measures. A narrative synthesis was performed and information related to each RQ was summarized.
2.3 Grey Literature Search
A search for commercial social robots used in real-world settings was conducted for the following reasons: (1) to find out about the state-of-the-art of robots created for real-world applications, e.g., used in hospitals, care homes, and private residences interacting with patients and/or other stakeholders, and (2) to identify robots that may have been omitted in the review process due to a lack of academic studies.
This search is limited to the publicly available information on companies’ and organizations’ Web sites which was mostly in the form of demonstration videos, product data sheets, and testimonials. This type and form of information was deemed different enough from the kind of information provided in the peer-reviewed studies collected for the systemic review that the team decided to analyze the results separately to answer RQ6. Grey literature searches, particularly for technology-related topics, are a useful method for finding information on industry products and real-world interventions [
161] (see Table 2 where one or more “yes” responses indicate that grey literature would be useful to include).
2.3.1 Eligibility Criteria.
The eligibility criteria for RQ6 and this search remained largely the same as the criteria used in the review of the academic literature, but within the context of identifying commercialized robots rather than studies. The included robots should also be of
Technology Readiness Level (TRL) [
88] seven or higher (TRL: 7
\(=\) operational environment demonstration, 8
\(=\) final testing and evaluation, 9
\(=\) successful deployment). Focusing on batch or mass-produced (excluding prototypes or concepts) which have clear use cases for paying customers ensures they are realistically grounded in technology-based services. In addition, the robots should have at least one health or wellbeing use case described, on their Web site or in related news articles.
2.3.2 Information Sources and Search Process.
Commercially available robots were identified through Google searches in English, patent databases, the IEEE robot compendium Web site robots.ieee.org, articles in IEEE Spectrum Robotics, and consulting with experts. As the searches were conducted in English, a bias toward companies with English-language publicly available information should be acknowledged. Google and Google Patents were searched between May and December 2021 using the terms “social robot” and health. Reviewers also browsed the identified company Web sites for these and related terms.
2.3.3 Robot Selection.
Selection occurred at the same time as searching/browsing by two team members. The team members were selected for their geographic knowledge: One is a South Korean social robotics researcher, and the other is a Canadian social robotics researcher with industry experience in Japan and France.
1 Web sites were reviewed for descriptions of robots, and if there was not enough information to determine the eligibility of the system to be included in this review, then it was excluded.
2.3.4 Data Charting and Analysis Processes.
Robots deemed eligible were entered into a shared spreadsheet and duplicates were identified and removed throughout the process. The data points collected for commonly shared specifications were determined through an iterative process with the whole team. We used a combination of keywords such as social robot in hospital/care home/care facility/health robot in the search engine to identify relevant robots, and robot company Web sites and news articles were used to collect further details. The collected information (e.g., name of the developer of the robot, robot specifications, price range of the robot, revenue, year of the robot’s initial release, the country where the robot was developed) was summarized in chart form. The result was an initial listing of commercialized social robots with at least one identified application related to wellbeing and healthcare. Next, in order to identify relevant robots that may have been omitted due to a lack of academic studies, the set of social robots was filtered to only include robots not covered by the peer-reviewed studies from RQ2. From this list, only those robots designed and developed with a primary purpose in healthcare (based on examination of company Web sites) were selected to provide a narrative review, alongside the review of robots from the peer-reviewed studies.
3 Results
Data were collected from a total of 443 articles.
Figure 3 shows the number of reviewed articles based on year (up to 6 February 2021). As expected, it suggests an increasing trend in HRI studies in the context of health and wellbeing.
Figure 2 shows the country of studies. Note that if a study was conducted by researchers in different countries, the number is increased for all those countries involved. The majority of the studies identified in this review have been conducted by researchers in Japan, followed by USA, Netherlands, Australia, Germany, UK, Italy, and New Zealand.
Figure 4 shows a word cloud created based on the article titles included in the review. This is meant to give an indication of recurring words in titles of those reviewed articles. As expected, “Social,” “Robot,” “Robotic,” “Social Robot,” and “Assistive Robot” (in line with our search criteria) were the most repeated words, along with words that show contexts (e.g., “Therapy,” “Companion,” “Exercise”), specific target users (“Older Adults,” “Dementia”), settings (e.g., “Nursing Home”), methods (e.g., “Case Study,” “Interaction,” and “Long-term”), and measurements (e.g., “Effect,” “Acceptance,” “Perception,” “Evaluation,” with one robot name, i.e., Paro, standing out).
3.1 RQ1—Settings
Study settings were extracted for each article if it was clearly mentioned in the article (e.g., the study was conducted in a care facility) or it could be inferred (e.g., after the participants arrived at the lab).
Figure 5 shows the number of articles using each study setting. The majority of the studies evaluated social robots in a long-term/daycare facility or a supported/independent living facility, followed by a research lab/facility. The study setting was not mentioned in many of the extracted articles (53 articles).
Some studies used mixed settings (e.g., home and hospital [
5], research lab and care center [
111]), which are shown as “Mixed” in
Figure 5.
Different terminologies were used for those marked as care center/supported living/independent living, such as senior living community, care center, care home, geriatric residence (participants’ rooms and shared areas), long-term care facility, nursing home, aged care facility, nursing home, residential aged care facilities, supported living, retirement homes, daycare center. This category included different locations in a center such as residents’ private rooms or common areas. Two Veterans Affairs care centers [
27,
77] were included.
Similarly, different terminologies were used in the articles to refer to studies in research labs, such as research lab, research center, and university lab. In some cases, the research lab was a research facility that was a realistic room or home, with the majority being smart homes (e.g., [
15,
16,
29,
60,
125,
130,
144,
148]).
3.2 RQ2—Robots
The review identified over 100 unique robots used in the reviewed studies. We initially aimed to cover the “top 10” cited robots for a detailed review. The closest cut-off criterion to achieve this was to consider roots that appeared in at least 7 articles, which resulted in a total of 11 robots for review.
Table 1 (rows marked with “R” or “B” under the Source column) shows a subset of the robots that were used, along with information about the robots’ developer, appearance, sensors, whether they can be programmed (open vs. closed system), degree of freedom, height, weight, mobility, and a photo of each robot.
Figure 6 shows the number of articles that used each robot, only including robots that were used in more than two articles. Note that the robot’s name was not mentioned in some of the research articles.
The most frequently used robot was Paro [
105], the zoomorphic robot in the shape of a baby seal, followed by the humanoid robots NAO [
95] and Pepper [
108]. While the most cited robot was an animal-like robot, the majority of the robots that were included in the list of most frequently used robots were human-like robots. As can be seen in
Table 1, the robots used in the reviewed studies are quite diverse in terms of their sensors, degrees of freedom, height, weight, and mobility.
Robot operation type was extracted for each study. The articles either explicitly mentioned the robot operation type, or it was inferred by the team from the study’s descriptions (e.g., from procedure).
Figure 7 shows different operation types and the number of studies that used that operation type, as well as whether this type was explicitly reported in the paper or was inferred. As can be seen in
Figure 7, many studies did not clearly mention the robot operation type, while such information is important for understanding the outcome of the studies, their possible applicability, as well their potential for replicability.
Often, social robots, whether research prototypes or commercially available products are programmable (except for some cases such as the Paro robot), and aside from some pre-programmed functionalities by the company, they can be programmed for different purposes, scenarios, and applications. To better understand how the social robots were used in the studies, we investigated types of modifications (hardware or software) that were made by the research team for the purpose of the study.
Figure 8 shows the results. If no modifications were made to the robot, it is categorized as “No.” If the modification was only in the robot’s software (e.g., the robot was programmed to have specific functionalities), it was categorized as “Yes—Software.” If the modification was in the robot’s hardware (e.g., the robot’s hardware was augmented with external sensors such as Kinect sensors, cameras, physiological sensors, etc., or different robot body parts were modified to meet specific application requirements), the paper was categorized under “Yes—Hardware.” Finally, if both software and hardware modifications were made, the paper was categorized as “Yes—Both.” “Yes—Both” also represents some cases where the robot was built/modified in the research lab for the purpose of the study. NA shows situations where the information could neither be extracted nor inferred.
As can be seen in
Figure 8, more than 200 articles used existing commercially available social robots without making any modifications to the robot’s software or hardware. The majority of these cases were when the Paro robot or the Joy for all cat and dog robots were used (and mainly in a care center setting). This could also be a reason why the majority of the papers used fully autonomous robots.
3.3 RQ3—Personal Healthcare Journey
As mentioned earlier, we were interested in studying different stages of one’s personal healthcare journey in which a robot can support our health/wellbeing. This included stages of one’s health journey for those who might be healthy, or require different levels of health/well-being support. Journey mapping (also referred to as patient journey mapping) is proposed as a novel approach in medical healthcare that facilitates understanding of patients’ healthcare experiences, and is argued to provide a patient-centric approach to research and care, which involves creation of narrative timelines, demonstrating patients’ different experiences such as healthcare encounters [
86]. One of the methods in the patient journey mapping is experience mapping, which provides a broad overview of how individuals interact with different services and products [
72]. In this article, we embarked on viewing the reviewed articles with this particular lens. The categories characterizing the personal healthcare journey were decided by the multi-disciplinary team (i.e., with backgrounds in Psychology, Health, and Computer Science, HCI, HRI, Robotics and Engineering), as well as by testing and evaluating them on a subset of the papers. The four main stages included:
—
Assisting with maintaining one’s health/wellbeing. This includes support such as reminding individuals to exercises, providing mental health support, providing companionship, and so on.
—
Assisting with recovery/treatment without hospitalization. This includes situations that a health condition exist without a need for hospitalization. For example, heart conditions, blood pressures, diabetes, and so on, which need at home monitoring.
—
Assisting with recovery/treatment during hospitalization. This stage includes being hospitalized or being treated at a healthcare facility. Examples include situations where the robots provide additional support to medical doctors and nurses, provide encouragement, and assist with monitoring conditions at the hospital/healthcare facility.
—
Assisting with recovery/treatment after hospitalization. This stage includes providing additional care after an individual is released from a hospital. For example, by monitoring the recovery process, supporting rehabilitation (e.g., through exercises), and so on.
As the setting can highly affect the nature of support for recovery/treatment, we also separated home settings from care centers in the results. Therefore, we have six final categories: (1) maintaining health/wellbeing, (2) supporting treatment/recovery before/without hospitalization at home, (3) supporting treatment/recovery before/without hospitalization at a care center, (4) supporting treatment/recovery at a hospital, (5) supporting treatment/recovery after hospitalization at home, and (6) supporting treatment/recovery after hospitalization at a care center.
To better envision this personal health journey, please see
Figure 9 for a visual illustration, and consider the illustrative scenario described in
Figure 10 which details a personal healthcare journey for a fictional individual.
2 The purpose of this illustration is to provide an example of the different stages of the proposed personal health journey by showing one example of a potential journey and one of the ways that a robot can be used in each of the stages of this journey. It is important to emphasize that the journey, as well as the function of the robot may vastly change based on each individual’s experiences and needs. It is also important to emphasize that these stages of the journey are not necessarily in a particular order. Individuals may experience different sequences of those stages and may go back and forth between different stages. For example, an individual that is fully recovered after hospitalization could go to the first stage and use social robots for maintaining health/wellbeing, or a healthy individual who is using the social robots for maintaining health/wellbeing may need urgent hospitalization (thus skipping the recovery/treatment before hospitalization stage) and use the social robots during the hospitalization and/or for post care afterward.
Figure 11 shows the results. The majority of the articles focused on studies where the social robot was used to help people maintain their health/wellbeing. Other categories, i.e., social robots assisting with recovery or providing treatment before/without hospitalization, social robots used during hospitalization and rehabilitation, and social robots used for recovery and treatment after hospitalization received relatively less attention compared to maintaining wellbeing, despite being investigated, to some extent, in the past studies.
While we have included any article that had findings related to the use of social robots in the health/wellbeing context (as described in the inclusion/exclusion criteria), we specify in
Figure 11 whether the health aspect was the primary or secondary contribution of the paper. A secondary focus suggests that the user study’s primary focus might have been in assessing a factor other than health application (e.g., quality of the robot’s voice detection), with a secondary focus on assessing the health application (e.g., users’ opinions about the robot in the context of health/wellbeing). As can be seen in
Figure 11, the health aspect was a secondary focus in only a small subset of the reviewed articles.
3.4 RQ4—User Population and Health Conditions
Figure 12 shows a summary of the number of participants in the reviewed studies. The number of participants ranged from 1 to 212 (note: some articles had additional online studies, which were not included here as those did not meet our inclusion criteria). The average number of participants in the studies was 25.5 and the median was 16. As can be seen in
Figure 12, the majority of the studies relied on a relatively small sample of participants.
Figure 13 shows participants’ health conditions in the reviewed studies. A condition is included in this graph only if it appeared in more than two research articles. Otherwise, it is shown as other. Other included Schizophrenia, Diabetes, brain injury, neuro-developmental disorders, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, orthopaedic-related issues, chronic health conditions, and Parkinson’s disease.
Among those studies that discussed participants’ health conditions, the majority of the studies were conducted involving participants with
Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), Cognitive Impairment, or Dementia (including different types of dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease). Some studies recruited participants with mixed health conditions (e.g., many of those conducted in hospitals), or individuals who had more than one health condition. These are shown as “Mixed” in
Figure 13. Some papers specifically mentioned that the participants were healthy (or used other terms such as unimpaired, able-bodied, etc.). These are shown as Healthy. Finally, a large range of studies did not discuss whether participants had specific health conditions. These are shown as “NA” in
Figure 13.
3.5 RQ5—Interaction with the Robot and Data Type
Interaction Type. Figure 14 shows how the robots were used by the participants in terms of the number of robots that interacted with each participant. One-to-one refers to studies where a robot was used with each participant. One-to-many refers to studies where one robot was used with a group of participants. One-to-two refers to studies where a robot was used by two participants. In two-to-many studies two robots were used by a group of participants. Finally, this information was missing in some of the reviewed articles, which is shown as “Not clear/NA.”
The majority of the studies had one robot interacting with each participant separately in the studies (one-to-one), followed by using one robot with a group of people (one-to-many). The majority of these cases were studied in care centers that used a robot in group sessions with residents. In a few other articles, one robot was assigned to two participants (one-to-two), with the majority being a couple, or a caregiver together with an intended user. In some cases, these numbers had to be inferred from the described procedure of the studies.
Duration. We also reviewed the duration of the interaction. Based on how the reviewed articles reported interactions, we grouped interaction duration into three categories:
—
Single-short: studies in which the participants interacted with the social robot once for a maximum of 1 hour.
—
Long-short: studies in which the participants interacted with the social robot once for more than 1 hour (less than 1 day).
—
Repeated/Long-term: studies where the participants interacted with the robot in multiple sessions on different days, or continuously for a long period of time (more than 1 day). Note that we were not able to distinguish between repeated and long-term as many of the studies did not clarify how the robot was given to the participants in long-term studies (i.e., in different sessions, or participants had access to the robot all the time).
Figure 15 shows the results. If multiple studies were reported in an article, each study is shown in
Figure 15. For example, if two studies were presented, one being a Single-short study and the other a Single-long study, two counts are added to this figure, one for each of the categories. If the study took different times for different participants (e.g., some participants decided to stop earlier), we considered the maximum interaction time achieved in the study.
Data Type. Figure 16 shows the type of data gathered in the studies (note that these show data types and do not necessarily show a proper data analysis related to that data type). The majority of the studies relied on mixed data, followed by qualitative data.
3.6 RQ6—Commercial Social Healthcare Robots in Real-World Settings
Commercial social healthcare robots have been used in real-world settings as well (See
Figure 17). Therefore, we conducted a grey literature search to identify robots used in real-world settings, addressing RQ6. Nineteen commercial social robots (Aibo, Buddy, Care-O-Bot, Spot, ElliQ, James, Jibo, Joy for All Cat/Dog, Kuri, Mabu, Moxi, Paro, Pepper, Stevie, Replika, Astro, Kompai, Lovot, Nabaztag) were selected as cases by two roboticist team members, according to the grey literature search procedure and criteria described in
Section 2.3. An inter-rater agreement between the researchers was calculated using Cohen’s kappa coefficient (k) to select the robots. The coefficient for selected robot cases was 0.53, indicating moderate agreement. In case of disagreement, both researchers met and discussed the final selections. We grouped and report details of the robots based on their characteristics and usage contexts, along with their country of origin.
3Home Companion Robots—
Pet robots: Aibo (Japan), Joy for All Cat and Dog (USA), Lovot (Japan), and Paro (Japan). They are robots that look like or act like pets mostly used for companionship, wellbeing, and reducing loneliness. Aibo (
\(\$\)2,900 USD
4), Joy for All (
\(\$\)125–140 USD
5), and Lovot (998,800 yen, approx.
\(\$\)7,200 USD) are business-to-consumer robots, meaning that they can be purchased by the consumer directly from the company for personal use at home or care centers. In this sense, they are applicable to personal healthcare journey stages of
Maintaining Health, and
Recovery/Treatment Before or After Hospitalization. Paro (
\(\$\)6,400 USD
6) is mainly purchased through distributors
7 for use by hospitals and care centers
8 in the stages
Hospitalization and
Recovery/Treatment after Hospitalization. The robots interact mainly through touch, movements, and sounds, and Aibo has some verbal capacity to play games and develop over time. The Joy for All Cat and Dog, Lovot, and Paro are all soft and huggable robots. Lovot is customizable with clothes and accessories, and multiple payment plans are offered
9: a main unit cost (498,800 yen or approx.
\(\$\)3,600 USD one-time payment or monthly instalments) plus maintenance monthly costs (10,998–21,998 yen or approx.
\(\$\)80–160 USD/month).
—
Tabletop robots: ElliQ (Israel), Jibo (USA), Nabaztag (France), and Mabu (USA). Generally, they are used in similar contexts to the pet robots for providing companionship at home, but can speak and offer higher cognitive abilities than the pet robots. These robots are mostly under 50 cm in height and are placed on tables when interacting with patients or users. For instance, Nabaztag allowed for connecting to other owners, playing music, providing weather and news reports. ElliQ (
\(\$\)1,499 USD) and Mabu were specifically designed for healthcare and are further described below. Overall, they are used in the stages
Maintaining Health, and
Recovery/Treatment Before or After Hospitalization. The team also identified a socially interactive agent, Replika
10 (USA), which is a virtual human chatbot application for smartphones. While it is not a robot, its social capabilities for reducing loneliness and wide user base make it an interesting case study for a low-cost wellbeing interventions.
—
Mobile robots: Kuri (USA,
\(\$\)700 USD
11), Buddy (France,
\(\$\)1,700–2,000 USD
12), and Astro (USA,
\(\$\)1,600 USD
13) are small mobile robots aimed for the home. They are similar to the tabletop companion robots in that they offer some convenient capabilities, but are also mobile and can move around the home to perform, for example, surveillance. They are used in the stages
Maintaining Health as they can support wellbeing but none are specifically for healthcare.
Hospital or Care Center Robots. Moxi (USA), Pepper (France, Japan), Spot (USA), Stevie (Ireland), Kompai (France), Care-o-Bot (Germany), and James (Belgium) are mobile robots that are too large for the average home but can be found in public spaces such as hospitals and care centers. Spot (
\(\$\)75,000 USD) was used for checking temperatures in hospitals during COVID-19.
14 Pepper (
\(\$\)20,000 USD for businesses) has been deployed in hospitals and care centers as a welcome agent, to help soothe patient anxiety and lead group exercises. Stevie, Kompai, Care-o-Bot are mainly deployed in care centers. James (
\(\$\)18,000 USD) was used for telepresence with loved ones for hospitals and care centers, to reduce loneliness. Moxi is a social robot aimed more for moving items across hospitals, and is described in further detail below. In the context of wellbeing and health, they are generally used across all stages, but especially stages
Hospitalization and
Recovery/Treatment before or after Hospitalization at hospitals and care centers.
Among the 19 robots, we further describe three robots (ElliQ, Mabu, Moxi) that were specifically designed and developed for the healthcare industry, and not otherwise mentioned in peer-reviewed research from RQ2. See
Table 1 for the details of the robots. The three social robots designed specifically for healthcare, ElliQ, Mabu, and Moxi, are deployed at different stages, with varied goals, in the personal healthcare journey. ElliQ is deployed in homes as a companion and entertainment robot for older adults, providing conversation and games, wellness check-ins, connection with loved ones and morning motivations. In this sense, it falls into the stage of “Maintaining Health and Wellbeing.” In 2022, ElliQ was launched at
\(\$\)250 USD plus a monthly subscription cost, with customers such as the State of New York
15 or individuals through commercial health plans as a benefit.
16 On the other hand, Mabu focuses on medication reminders, medical tracking, and monitoring, acting as an alternative to traditional patient questionnaires. As the user is already receiving treatment with a medical plan, this robot supports Home Treatment/Recovery. In 2019, Mabu was reported to have collaborated with pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and healthcare providers such as Kaiser Permanente to supply the robot to users, allowing the cost to be covered by insurance.
17 These two robots speak to the users: ElliQ holds voice conversations, while Mabu receives input through a touchscreen interface. Both ElliQ and Mabu are small robots (less than 35 cm) designed for tabletops with tablets, with movements but without the ability to navigate around in spaces. ElliQ can be deployed for
Maintaining Health and Wellbeing across the personal healthcare journey, whereas Mabu can be deployed in the
Home Recovery/Treatment (before/without),
During hospitalization/Rehabilitation and
Home Recovery/Treatment (after) stages of the proposed personal healthcare journey. Lastly, Moxi is developed for the
During hospitalization/Rehabilitation stage of the journey. One of the initial US hospitals to deploy Moxi was Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas,
18 and Moxi is increasing its deployment in American hospitals. Unlike Mabu, its main user is not the patient. Rather, it assists healthcare workers in their workplace, assisting with their routines such as running for patient supplies, delivering lab samples, and fetching items and medications. Thus, Moxi’s social capability to interact with the patients is less of a focus, and its navigation, safety, and robustness are more emphasized.
Other commercial robots have been used in real-world settings beyond the scope of this article, e.g., Cozmo (USA), Moxie (USA), and AV1 (Norway) have been deployed specifically for children, and therefore are not discussed here.
4 Discussion, Gaps, and Future Directions
We presented a systematic review of 443 articles that evaluated social robots in a health/wellbeing context with adult participants. The papers represented studies conducted in over 40 different countries. The majority of the studies were conducted at a care center or supported/independent living setting, as well as a research facility. Also, while a large number of different social robots with different functionalities and appearances were used in the different studies, the majority of the studies used Paro, NAO, or Pepper robots and the other robots were only used in a few studies. Also, in the majority of the studies the robots were operated autonomously.
Personal Healthcare Journey and Participant Populations. With the goal of developing social robots that can continue supporting individuals in different aspects of health/wellbeing, e.g., by being programmed to provide different types of support, we proposed the vision of a “Personal healthcare journey.” We defined different stages of this journey, starting from when a person is healthy and may need support for
maintaining health/wellbeing, to situations when they may need
treatment or recovery before or after hospitalization, either at home, or at a healthcare center. We analyzed the reviewed papers through this lense to investigate which parts of this journey have been focused on in the past studies. The vast majority of the articles evaluated social robots that were focused on assisting individuals with maintaining their health/wellbeing, while other parts of the journey, such as support during treatment/recovery have attracted relatively less attention. This could be due to challenges involved in running studies with social robots at hospitals or care centers, where the robots need to be programmed to effectively and safely support individuals with treatment and recovery. Also, as in these cases the social robots are often programmed to address specific conditions, participant recruitment could pose a challenge in conducting large scale studies. Perhaps due to similar challenges, participants’ health conditions were limited in the reviews studies, with the majority being either healthy or having cognitive impairments or Dementia (a condition that has affected a large number of older adults worldwide [
100,
101]). Other conditions, such as individuals with a history of stroke, depression, cardiovascular issues, and so on, were only included in a few studies.
Also, although we identified a few studies that had a large number of participants (over 100), the majority of the studies relied on smaller samples (less than 40). This can limit and affect outcome of evaluations, both due to limited sample size, and due to affecting the feasibility of having control groups in the studies for a more thorough evaluation. This challenge could also be affected by the availability of resources, i.e., social robots, as many of the reviewed studies used one-to-one interactions between social robots and participants, as well as repeated/long-term interactions, which can affect the feasibility of conducting the studies with a larger group of participants.
Robotic Platform and Robot Operation. While the reviewed studies covered a large range of studies using social robots for supporting individuals’ health and wellbeing, the majority of the studies were focused on the use of the Paro robot, a robot in the shape of a baby seal that is not programmable, i.e., it comes with a fixed set of pet-like behaviors and functionalities that cannot be modified. Those studies were conducted in care centers. This could also be the reason why the majority of the studies were focused on maintaining health/wellbeing, as Paro is often used in related contexts such as pet therapy (although it has been shown to have potentials in other domains, such as for reducing depression). Also, in over 200 articles the robots were not programmed for a specific application, and only their original pre-programmed functionalities were used, which could limit robots’ applications and functionalities. However, with social robots’ potentials in supporting individuals with different health conditions, future work needs to take advantage of the range of different available social robots and their specific capabilities, and program them to meet the needs and preferences of individuals with different health conditions to better understand and leverage social robots’ potentials in supporting health/wellbeing. Modifications to the robots’ hardware may be appropriate in many of these cases, where health scenarios could benefit from interfacing social robots with other sensors such as physiological sensors, a modification that was done in a small subset of the reviewed articles. It is also important to evaluate the robots in different settings that they are envisioned to be beneficial for (and are already used in real-world settings), such as during or after hospitalization, i.e., in hospitals or clinics, or in people’s homes. Of course this would require significant effort in designing safe and robust robots that can operate autonomously in these settings.
Study Reporting and Replicability. Many of the reviewed articles did not clearly describe details of their study methodology, such as the setting, method of robot operation, or even details about their participants or participants’ interactions with the robot, which highly affects replicability of the studies. As social robots are gaining attention for supporting individuals’ health/wellbeing, and due to the existing challenges with recruiting large groups of participants, it is important to properly report these details to enable replication of the studies in other settings and with other user groups. Future work can also benefit from large scale studies, as the majority of studies were based on smaller sample sizes (
\({\lt}\)40), and were not diverse in terms of gender of participants (e.g., only included those who identified as male or female). Therefore, future work can benefit from replicable, long-term evaluation studies with a large and diverse group of participants. Of course, this will be highly challenging in nature (technically, financially, etc.) and will require multi-disciplinary teams including social robotics researchers, as well as patients, health providers, and clinicians, who could provide feedback on the development of the robot (e.g., through co-design [
138]; i.e., involvement of stakeholders in all steps of decision-making, design, and development), and assist with conducting the studies in a setting such as a hospital, clinic, assistive living, or care home.
Design of the Robots’ Tasks and Behaviors. In this review, we had originally planned to also report on whether the robots were developed through co-design approaches. However, this information was missing in the vast majority of the studies, so we could not report on this category. However, it will be informative if the design of the robot, hardware, software, and interaction design, can be clarified in future research and publications, to better understand how decisions on design and development of the robot were made (e.g., by researchers in one research area, a multi-disciplinary team, or through co-design with potential users and stakeholders), which could also help with a better understanding and comparison of the study outcomes.
Commercial Social Healthcare Robots Used in Real-World Settings. The investigation into commercial social healthcare robots highlighted elements that are less frequently considered in social robotics research: cost and buyer. The social robots in this section were created for a specific end-users such as a nurse, older adult, or patients. However, the buyers were primarily healthcare providers such as hospitals, or businesses such as insurance companies (business-to-business or “B2B” model). For example, Moxi was purchased by hospitals, and Mabu was sold to pharmaceutical and insurance companies. At the hospitalization and recovery/treatment stages of the Personal healthcare journey, the hospitals and insurance companies may utilize these technologies as a mechanism to reduce costs, e.g., by optimizing personnel or helping ensure compliance with medications. ElliQ is aimed at state-provided or commercial health plans to provide their members as a benefit, promoting “member engagement retention and satisfaction,” “improved care delivery,” and “data collection.” The adoption of social robots is ultimately linked to the cost and benefits to the purchaser, and therefore future research could consider these elements as constraints and motivations when designing health and wellbeing social robots.
5 More Recent Studies
As expected with such large-scale reviews, there is a time gap between when the search was conducted and when this article is written and will be published. Therefore, in this section we provide a summary of some of the papers that were published during this time gap.
19Methodology for Search. The goal of this part was not to do a comprehensive review; rather to cover some of the existing work that emerged since our search concluded. Therefore, we searched Google Scholar and ACM DL and limited the search to the past 2 years. Our stopping criteria were finding 20 articles that met our inclusion criteria (we decided on this number to be realistic in terms of the time needed to complete this section without causing a delay that can affect the recency of our main search). Eight articles were suggested at the reviewing stage. To identify the remaining articles, we manually checked the titles of the articles and if they seemed to meet our inclusion criteria, we checked their abstract and full paper. If they met our criteria, the paper was added to our list. We continued this until we found 20 articles.
20 Therefore, a total of 20 articles that met the inclusion/exclusion criteria are included in this section. Below, we present their findings related to each of the RQs.
RQ1—Setting. We see a pattern similar to the main review for the setting of these 20 studies. Majority of the studies (6 of the 20) were conducted in care center articles [
3,
21,
46,
120,
132,
140], followed by a research lab [
36,
123,
152] (4/20) and participants homes [
44,
63,
81,
158] (3/20). Other settings included a cafe (exhibition/supermarket/outside) [
12], a company workplace in a study room [
136], a health facility (wellness center) [
91], a rehabilitation center [
4], outside at a music festival tent [
25], and in a mix of participants’ home and university dormitory rooms [
70]. Study setting was not mentioned in one of the studies [
22].
RQ2—Robots. The pattern we observed for the robots is slightly different from the one from the review as Paro is no longer the robot in the majority of the studies. Pepper was used in the majority of the articles included in this section, with 10 out of 20 studies using Pepper [
4,
21,
22,
25,
36,
123,
132,
140,
152,
158]. The other 10 studies used Jibo [
70], QT [
12], a mix of Misty and QT Robots [
136], Ommie [
91], Ryan (inferred) [
3], social robot LOVOT [
46], James (Zorabotics) [
120], Joy4All Silver [
44], and Hyodol [
81]. One study used social robot pets without specifying the brand [
63]. Also, one study used NAO along with Pepper [
152].
Although this may suggest a significant decrease in the use of the Paro robot, as it was used in the majority of the studies in the main article but none in this search, we cannot provide a strong comment on this difference as the search for this part was not similar to the search in the main article.
Robot operation followed a similar pattern to the operations retrieved in the main review. Robot operation was fully autonomous in the vast majority of the articles (17 out of 20) [
3,
4,
12,
21,
22,
25,
44,
46,
63,
70,
81,
120,
123,
132,
136,
140,
158]. Robot operation was not mentioned and could not be inferred in two of the articles [
36,
91] and one used Wizard of Oz [
152].
RQ3—Personal Healthcare Journey. For the Personal Healthcare Journey stages, also, we see a similar pattern: “Maintaining Health/Wellbeing” is the most commonly used stage, used in 11 out of 20 articles [
12,
22,
25,
36,
70,
81,
91,
123,
136,
140,
152]. This was followed by the “Recovery/Treatment (before/without)—Care Center” stage (three studies) [
3,
21,
120], “During Hospitalization/Rehabilitation” (two studies) [
4,
132], and “Recovery/Treatment (before/without)—Home” (two studies) [
63,
158]. Other stages covered was “Recovery/Treatment (after)—Care Center” [
46] and “Recovery/Treatment (after)—Home” [
44].
RQ4—Health Conditions. Similar to our main review, here also, the majority of the participants were either health (10 out of 20) [
12,
22,
36,
70,
81,
123,
132,
136,
140,
152] or had MCI/CI/Dementia (6 out of 20) [
3,
21,
46,
63,
120,
158]. Another two had participants with a mix of healthy and individuals with anxiety [
91], as well as participants with mobility/motor impairments [
4]. One study mentioned that the participants were not tracked for their condition (were presumably healthy or mixed) [
25], and in one the participants were undergoing hemodialysis (e.g., for kidney failure) [
44].
RQ5—Interaction with the Robots. Similar to the main review, the majority of the studies used one-to-one interactions (13 of 20 papers) [
3,
4,
22,
25,
36,
44,
70,
81,
91,
123,
136,
152,
158]. In four cases, interactions were one-to-many [
12,
21,
120,
140], and in other three cases there was a mix of one-to-one and one-to-many [
63,
132] or two-to-many [
46] interactions.
Further, similar to the main review, the majority of the studies followed a Repeated/Long-term interaction (16 out of 20 articles) [
3,
4,
12,
21,
22,
36,
44,
46,
63,
70,
81,
120,
132,
136,
140,
152]. Four articles included Single-Short interactions [
25,
91,
123,
158].
One main difference between what we saw in these 20 articles and the results of the review was that all the articles covered here reported on the interaction duration, while we had a large number of papers that did not mention the interaction duration in our main review.
6 Strengths and Limitations
This review has many strengths and limitations. The database searches were run on 6 February 2021 and grey literature searches were conducted between May and December 2021. Due to the large number of articles and the significant amount of screening that needed to be done (in duplicates to follow best practice guidelines by PRISMA), as well as the large amount of data extraction and analysis on the final set of 443 articles, this review took 2.5 years to be completed. It is important to emphasize that with such large-scale review, and to precisely follow PRISMA guidelines, it is expected to for the reviews to leave out the most recent work. As we aimed to conduct a large-scale systematic review, we traded-off having a comprehensive literature and thorough methodology with recency. Still, to the best of our knowledge, this review is the most comprehensive and most up to date review in this area.
Further, this study only focused on articles published in English and gaps and limitations were discussed based on articles published in English. We spent a significant amount of time defining and iteratively improving our search terms, and had a librarian as a member of our team who assisted with creating comprehensive search terms and adjusting them to different databases. Yet, there might have been papers that were not identified through our search terms. Aside from the search terms and with the goal of being comprehensive, we also identified a list of journals and conferences that are likely to publish the related articles, to ensure that they were indexed in at least one of these five databases. There were other related challenges. For example, searching non-health databases required the search to include health or wellbeing terms, which are broad concepts and may lead to missing some relevant papers. Also, limitations in some of the databases such as IEEE Xplore may affect replicability of the search.
For evaluations, we relied on reviewed papers’ evaluations of their results as opposed to our own evaluation of each paper’s outcome for multiple reasons. First, due to the large number of papers, this could have added significant amount of time, affecting recency of the review. Second, the vast majority of the articles did not have their data available and only shared high-level results, which made it impossible to evaluate on our end. Therefore, as effectiveness of the outcomes was not one of our RQs in this review, we did not evaluate the articles’ outcomes. Also, in some cases, we had to infer some information (e.g., robot operation) based on the way the paper discussed the methodology, as many papers did not clearly include details on different aspects of their methodologies. Although we attempted to be accurate with the information inferred, and if it could not be inferred we clearly indicated that the information cannot be inferred, it is still possible that some of the inferred information may not be accurate. In the article, we have clearly discussed and showed what we inferred vs. what the papers explicitly mentioned. Similarly, although everything was checked by at least two people in the team, there is always a potential for human error in the data screening/extraction steps. For example, it is possible that in some cases NA might have been entered for a category if the information was included in the paper in a way that it was hard to find/extract, or was not described clearly. Regardless, minor differences in some of the reported numbers are unlikely to have affected the overall results and identified gaps.
Different terminologies were another area of challenge in this review, similar to others. In this article, we first presented a clear definition of social robots and the health/wellbeing context that we considered in the review, based on which the search and screening processes were performed. As there may exist different definitions for social robots, it is possible that we have not considered some articles that use another type of robot that was not considered as a social robot in our definition (e.g., a purely tele-operated robot that does not interact with the participants itself). It is important to emphasize that, for the definitions, we relied on the definitions that are used by the majority of the researchers and are provided by the pioneers in this research area. Similarly, the categories created in this article (e.g., for robot operation, “Personal healthcare journey”) were based on iterative discussions between the multi-disciplinary team members and validations based on the outcome of the search; however, other categories may be possible to include by other researchers.
Finally, we conducted a grey literature search. The grey literature search for commercialized social robots for health/wellbeing was completed in English only on Web browsers located in North America, and therefore cannot be considered exhaustive. This may explain the predominance of robots deployed in the United States in the final set of cases, although our initial list of robots included those developed in Canada, Japan, Norway, USA, France, Germany, Israel, Belgium, and Ireland. As healthcare systems can differ across countries, the narrative review may not be broadly applicable worldwide.
The article has many strengths. The review was conducted by a large and multi-disciplinary team with backgrounds in Computer Science and Engineering, Psychology, Health, as well as a Librarian who was an expert in conducting search in different databases and highly assisted with the methodology of this review. This helped us (a) to be more comprehensive in terms of methodology and analysis, (b) to include different perspectives and knowledge sets in different stages of this review, and (c) to increase the chance that the outcome of the study can be interesting to researchers in different areas.
Aside from new RQs being addressed in this review, this is the most comprehensive review of social robots used in the health/wellbeing domain, covering 443 peer-reviewed conference and journal articles. To the best of our knowledge, past reviews have covered a maximum of 69 articles (see [
128]), which is significantly less than what is covered in this review.
7 Conclusion
This article provided a systematic review of 443 research articles that had user studies with adult participants interacting with social robots in a health/wellbeing context. PRISMA guidelines were followed and the review was conducted by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers. An overview of the research on social robots in the context of health/wellbeing was provided and research gaps, such as limitations in terms of robot operation, health/wellbeing applications addressed, target participants involved, study locations, and reporting the user study procedure and results were identified, based on which future directions were motivated. An idea of a “Personal healthcare journey” was proposed to support development of adjustable and personalizable social robots that can support individuals in different steps of their lives and with different healthcare needs. With the increasing potentials of social robots in filling in the existing gaps in the healthcare systems and promoting health/wellbeing, we hope that this comprehensive review presented a summary of the past work, as well as potentials for future research directions and improvements.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Alice Blet for helping with the early stages of this review, and thank Doris Chang, Mahnoor Fatima, Dhivya Manohar, and Elmira Azizi Kashi for assisting with different stages of screening and data extraction. The authors would like to thank the following researchers/research groups for granting permission to reproduce and use the following robot images from
Table 1: Paro [
80] “Permission for image was given by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan,” Telenoid [
68], Bandit “Permission for the image of Bandit, socially assistive robot, was given by the USC Interaction Lab,” Brian “Courtesy of the Autonomous Systems and Biomechatronics Lab (ASBLab), University of Toronto,” Hobbit, Joy for all [
20], MARIO, and Elliq. Their inclusion in this article enhances the visual presentation and supports the research findings. We also thank Sarah Visintini, University of Ottawa Heart Institute Librarian, Jackie Stapleton, Health Librarian at the University of Waterloo, and Brie McConnell, Optometry Librarian at the University of Waterloo, for peer reviewing the PubMed search strategy.