Abstract
Long-term motor deficits affect approximately two thirds of stroke survivors, reducing their quality of life. An effective rehabilitation therapy requires intense and repetitive training, which is resource demanding. Virtual Agents (VAs) and Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) offer high intensity, repetitive and reproducible therapy and are thus both promising as rehabilitation tools. In this paper, we compare a SAR and a VA during a rehabilitation task in terms of users’ engagement and movement performance, while leveraging neuroscientific methods to investigate potential differences at the neural level. Results show that our participants’ performance on the exercise was higher with a SAR than with a VA, which was especially clear under conditions of decreased perceptual information. Our participants reported higher levels of engagement with the SAR. Taken together, we provide evidence that SARs are a favorable alternative to VAs as rehabilitation tools.
V. Vasco and C. Willemse—Contributed equally to this manuscript.
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Acknowledgments
This project is funded by the Joint Lab between IIT and Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi Onlus and by the Minded Program - Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 754490 (fellowship awarded to Pauline Chevalier). The authors thank Nina Hinz and Serena Marchesi for their assistance with data collection.
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Vasco, V. et al. (2019). Train with Me: A Study Comparing a Socially Assistive Robot and a Virtual Agent for a Rehabilitation Task. In: Salichs, M., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11876. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35888-4_42
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35888-4_42
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