Obesity is a chronic multifactorial pathology determined by genetic, psychological, social and environmental factors, by incorrect eating habits and a low level of physical activity. Very few individuals maintain long-term results achieved after diet therapy.
Therefore, there is urgent need to promote a persistent change in lifestyle in obese subjects, to improve adherence to treatment and to consolidate the results obtained over time. Therapeutic Education (TE) has taken over an important role as a multidisciplinary intervention aimed at improving lifestyle and at acquiring new skills for the management of the disease.
Although the the vast majority of people who attended TE programs considered them helpful, only a small portion maintains participation in such programs.
Assistive technologies, and in particular assistive social robots, are powerful tools to boost independence and improve participation.
The main objective of our project is to evaluate the effect of employing a social robot for helping obese people. The social robot TERESA will implement a TE assistant to enhance the social interactions between the patients and the carer and among the patients. More specifically, the goal of the project is to devise and validate a methodology and to measure to what extent a social robot can improve effectiveness in patient participation in programs for lifestyle change, by increasing motivation, commitment and fun and
reducing anxiety, negative moods, and embarrassment.
To achieve these objectives, we will use the methodology of the randomized clinical trial, comparing obese patients undergoing classical multidisciplinary therapeutic intervention including TE and a similar intervention in which the support of the TERESA social robot will also be employed.
The project will be carried out by two partners: 1) High Specialization Center for the Cure of obesity of the Sapienza University of Rome (CASCO) from Dept. of Experimental Medicine, 2) Cognitive and Cooperative Robots Lab (LabRoCoCo) from Dept. of Computer Control and Management Engineering. The proposed project will bring innovative contributions to both research fields of obesity management and social robots in health-care.
Although obesity is one of the most common pathology with difficulties in dealing with patients, the innovation of the proposal is guaranteed by the fact that no specific work on the use of social robots to help in TE for obesity is reported. Previous work has been done separately by the two research groups involved in this project.
As already mentioned, CASCO organized periodic meetings with obese patients with good results in the short-term period, that can be improved with new techniques for increasing egaging of patients to the TE sessions.
The motivation in performing this research is thus coming from the possibility of further increasing the benefits of TE sessions by using a social robot as a proper technological tool.
LabRoCoCo has also already worked in using social robots in educational activities, although not focussing TE groups and long-term interactions. The motivation of LabRoCoCo in the project comes from the possibility of a more extensive user evaluation of the social robot multi-modal interaction framework and of development and assessment of long-term interactions in a real user study. Moreover, previous work focussed on short-term interactions, where each user interacts with the robot for just a few minutes, while in TE program we are devising in this project, patients will interact with the robot for several hours in many different days.
Therefore, we will extend the social interactions behavior of the robot to take longer interactions in account, as well as implement specific content for obesity TE. In particular, we would like to implement new forms of social interactions, including non-verbal communication and engaging behaviors, to make the interactions more engaging
Consequently, the overall innovation of TERESA project can be identified in:
1. detailed description of the TE session and of the roles of medical tutor, obese patients, and the social robot - this documentation will advance the state of the art by providing for a methodology to be used for possible repetitions of the TE session by other professionals;
2. analysis of performance of the introduction of a social robot in TE sessions for obese people relative to patients' engagement, goal setting, and tracking progresses toward weight loss and weight loss maintenance - the results will be useful to compare other approaches in the literature, possibly opening a new trend of research about using social robot in obesity management;
3. usability analysis of the framework used to create social interactions to be used by non-robotic expert people - this analysis will advance the state of the art in human-robot interaction filed, by providing results in a real scenario.