During the pandemic school closures, city lockdown, financial pressures, and isolation from peers and friends could have an impact on children’s mental health for years to come, according to UNICEF, while resources to address the problem have been severely limited. Our target patients are children that are tactile and hence the existing therapy methods are less effective. They are withdrawn from the real world when they are using a screen-based tool. It is the most important step that we will be able to detect our child’s mental health issues and hence to give an appropriate treatment in advance.

Robots are perfect because they are in the physical world – they are more interactive, so the children are more engaged. In many cases, the children will enjoy talking with the robot and share information that they will not share online or in person. The robot we will use is about child-sized and completely non-threatening, children might see the robot as a confidante, so they feel like they will not get into trouble if they share secrets with it. It is exactly the key to “open up” the children for our assessment. The robot will be integrated with our ECA, which is a deep learning algorithm, so that it will actually “talk” with our patients and hopefully build trust with them.

Our ECA is specifically programmed to understand the natural language input by the user into a structured semantic frame, providing support for the subsequent dialogue management module and response generation module. Our robot will sympathize with them and enable them to express their true feelings and experiences. Consequently, we will be able to assess children who are struggling with their mental health in the earlier stage, and treatment can be given on time.

Children aged under 10 (20 – 50)

2023

Mental Health, Robotics/Automation, Well-being