Influencing Hand-washing Behaviour With a Social Robot: HRI Study With School Children in Rural India (original) (raw)
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2019 28th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2019
We introduce “Pepe”, a social robot for encouraging proper handwashing behaviour among children. We discuss the motivation, the robot design and a pilot study conducted at a primary school located in the Western Ghats mountain ranges of Southern India with a significant presence of indigenous tribes. The study included individual & group interviews with a randomly selected sample of 45 children to gauge their perception of the Pepe robot across various dimensions including gender, animacy & technology acceptance. We also discuss some HRI implications for running user studies with rural children.
International Journal of Social Robotics, 2023
We conducted an empirical study to co-design a social robot with children to bring about long-term behavioural changes. As a case study, we focused our efforts to create a social robot to promote handwashing in community settings while adhering to minimalistic design principles. Since cultural views influence design preferences and technology acceptance, we selected forty children from different socioeconomic backgrounds across India as informants for our design study. We asked the children to design paper mock-ups using pre-cut geometrical shapes to understand their mental models of such a robot. The children also shared their feedback on the eight resulting different conceptual designs of minimalistic caricatured social robots. Our findings show that children had varied expectations of the robot's emotional intelligence, interactions, and social roles even though it was being designed for a specific context of use. The children unequivocally liked and trusted anthropomorphized caricatured designs of everyday objects for the robot's morphology. Based on these findings, we present our recommendations for the physical and interaction features of a minimalist social robot assimilating the children's inputs and social robot design principles grounded in prior research. Future studies will examine the children's interactions with a built prototype. Keywords Child-robot interaction (CRI) • Social robot • Handwashing • Co-design • Human-robot interaction (HRI)
Assessing Children’s First Impressions of “WallBo” - A Robotic Handwashing Buddy
Interaction Design and Children, 2021
In this paper we present our preliminary results from the first trial conducted with "WallBo" a robotic buddy to improve handwashing for children in schools. The one-week trial was carried out in a Scottish school with 16 pupils, aged 6-7 in an ecologically valid setting. The 1:1 interaction with WallBo resulted in 86.25% handwashing compliance, a 33.25% improvement from the baseline handwashing technique pre-WallBo training, and an overall, ≈35% improvement on knowledge about hand hygiene. We also report some insights about perceptions about WallBo in this paper. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in interaction design; User interface design.
2022 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)
This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel collaborative educational game titled "Land of Hands", involving children and a customized social robot that we designed (HakshE). Through this gaming platform, we aim to teach proper hand hygiene practises to children and explore the extent of interactions that take place between a pro-social robot and children in such a setting. We blended gamification with Computers as Social Actors (CASA) paradigm to model the robot as a social actor or a fellow player in the game. The game was developed using Godot's 2D engine and Alice 3. In this study, 32 participants played the game online through a video teleconferencing platform Zoom. To understand the influence a pro-social robot's nudges has on children's interactions, we split our study into two conditions: With-Nudges and Without-Nudges. Detailed analysis of rubrics and video analyses of children's interactions show that our platform helped children learn good hand hygiene practises. We also found that using a pro-social robot creates enjoyable interactions and greater social engagement between the children and the robot although learning itself wasn't influenced by the pro-sociality of the robot.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
Hand washing is the practice which can save us from a vast spectrum of communicable diseases. The primary schools toilets and community toilets usually have wash basins or platforms built at a particular height. It has been observed that due to the height of these wash basins; it becomes unapproachable for small children. Also, limited numbers of taps discourage children from practicing hand washing. Keeping these factors in view and to promote the practice of hand washing among school children, Save the children has come up with a unique design of three stage hand washing platforms. The design of the platform is child friendly and allows children of every age group to wash their hands comfortably irrespective of their height.
The Lancet. Global health, 2014
Diarrhoea and respiratory infections are the two biggest causes of child death globally. Handwashing with soap could substantially reduce diarrhoea and respiratory infections, but prevalence of adequate handwashing is low. We tested whether a scalable village-level intervention based on emotional drivers of behaviour, rather than knowledge, could improve handwashing behaviour in rural India. The study was done in Chittoor district in southern Andhra Pradesh, India, between May 24, 2011, and Sept 10, 2012. Eligible villages had a population of 700-2000 people, a state-run primary school for children aged 8-13 years, and a preschool for children younger than 5 years. 14 villages (clusters) were selected, stratified by population size (<1200 vs >1200), and randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to intervention or control (no intervention). Clusters were enrolled by the study manager. Random allocation was done by the study statistician using a random number generator. The intervention ...
The American journal of tropical medicine and hygiene, 2018
We analyzed data from a cluster-randomized controlled trial conducted among 20 schools in Rajshahi, Bangladesh, to explore the role of social influence on handwashing with soap (HWWS) in a primary school setting. Using data collected through covert video cameras outside of school latrines, we used robust Poisson regression analysis to assess the impact of social influence-defined as the presence of another person near the handwashing location-on HWWS after a toileting event. In adjusted analyses, we found a 30% increase in HWWS when someone was present, as compared with when a child was alone (Prevalence ratio 1.30; 95% confidence interval: 1.14-1.47, < 0.001). The highest prevalence of HWWS was found when both child(ren) and adult(s) were present or when just children were present (64%). Our study supports the conclusion that the presence of another individual after a toileting event can positively impact HWWS in a primary school setting.
Americn Journal of Tropical Medicine, 2020
This study reports the impact of the HiFive program, a 6-week handwashing campaign that targets social and emotional motivators to improve student handwashing in primary schools in the Philippines. We designed a clustered randomized trial to evaluate the impact of HiFive on student handwashing behavior, motivation, and access. Of the sample of 196 primary schools located in two districts, half were randomly assigned to receive the program in the 2017-2018 school year. Survey and observation data were collected 3 months after the conclusion of the campaign. In control schools, only 2.5% of students were observed washing their hands with soap and water, our primary outcome and 14.8% were observed washing their hands with at least water. HiFive led to a 3.7 percentage point (p.p.) increase (P < 0.01) in the rate of handwashing with soap and water and a 5.6 p.p. increase (P = 0.03) in handwashing with at least water after toilet use. HiFive also led to a 10.8 p.p. (P < 0.01) increase in the number of handwashing facilities stocked with soap. The program had limited impact on the motivators targeted by the program, suggesting that the small improvements in handwashing may have been driven by increases in the availability of soap. More research is needed to understand how interventions can effectively trigger social motivators to improve handwashing behavior among schoolchildren, and whether the effectiveness of these programs can be augmented with "nudge"-based interventions from the behavioral sciences.