Improving Anxiety Management for Adolescents using Empathic Social Robots

The increasing prevalence of anxiety among adolescents highlights the need for innovative mental health interventions. This research explores the use of social robots to provide personalized support for anxiety management in adolescents, with a focus on enhancing user engagement and therapeutic outcomes through empathetic interactions. Employing a co-design methodology, this study involves mental health professionals and prospective users to ensure the technology meets end-user needs. Additionally, an “in-the-wild” research design is utilized to study human-robot interaction within a relevant socio-cultural context that provides results with stronger ecological validity. This research proposes two potentially iterative phases: a co-design phase with mental health professionals to gather insights on the design and implementation of the robot system, and a validation phase with adolescents to assess the quality of interaction and the effectiveness of anxiety management skills. The social robot, developed using the Furhat platform, aims to offer a non-judgmental, accessible tool for mental health coaching, focusing on emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. This research aims to apply models of computational empathy in enhancing adolescent-robot interactions to support adolescent mental well-being.