Measuring children’s wellbeing and mental health with social robots

Poor mental health particularly affects children in vulnerable groups.

For example, children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children who have experienced forced migration, e.g., refugees, are more at risk of poor mental health outcomes in comparison with their peers.

However, there is a lack of research on children’s wellbeing and its relation with linguistic abilities and the ability to successfully engage in social interactions, which are typical challenges in these vulnerablegroups.

Moreover, traditional methods to measure wellbeing and mental health in children, such as self-report questionnaires, have several limitations, e.g. they require reading, comprehension, and concentration skills that are particularly challenging especially for children with DLD and refugee children.The MICRO project aims to advance knowledge on how linguistic abilities and the ability to successfully engage in social interactions affect children’s wellbeing and mental health.

To achieve this objective, the project will explore the use of social robots as new tools to measure children’s wellbeing and mental health in a school context.

This will be done with a particular focus on vulnerable groups that are potential targets for preventative interventions, such as children with DLD and refugee children.

By adopting an interdisciplinary approach combining expertise in human-robot interaction, automatic wellbeing analysis, child psychology and psychiatry, social cognition, and gender research, and through collaboration with stakeholders engaged with the targeted vulnerable groups, MICRO will conduct a cross-national investigation with vulnerable and typically developing 8-12-year-old children, at the individual and group level.

This will further our understanding of what constructs are core or universal to subjective wellbeing and what are unique to particular contexts or even individuals, thus paving the way for targeted wellbeing and mental health interventions.