Implicit Aspects of the Psychosocial Rehabilitation with a Humanoid Robot.

The paper presents an approach to understanding the emergent dynamics of human-robot interaction in the specific case of a humanoid robot taking the role of a co-therapist to the human therapist in psychosocial rehabilitation by focusing on the nonverbal communication in these sessions. The intention is to eliminate the negative effects of reactance to the robot by employing the SociBot platform, which has been designed with enhanced facial features. An empirical study is performed to investigate implicit aspects of perceiving faces of different modality. The results show that viewers assess differently the positive and negative features, which could be attributed to the presented faces – human, android or robotic (machine-looking). At the same time, no effect of type of face on the feature assessment process was observed. Some implications for using robots as co-therapists are briefly discussed as an emerging interactive technology in support of people with special needs.