As healthcare shifts towards a patient centered model, robotic technology can play an important role in monitoring, informing, supporting, and connecting independently living individuals with various physical and mental health conditions. As part of a study evaluating the use of the Socially Assistive Robot (SAR) Paro in the homes of older adults with depression, we performed two focus groups with clinicians to discuss how they might use sensor data collected by domestic SARs in clinical practice. In the first focus group, participants discussed potential uses of currently available SARs and sensors by them and their clients. The second focus group took place after sensor data from sensors onboard the Paro robot had been collected in older adults' homes. Clinicians considered the data and what information might be most useful for supporting clinical care. Data regarding monitoring client health, such as behavioral changes in sleep and daily activity levels, were of particular interest to clinicians. They also suggested using SARs to provide clients with information and interaction could help them develop coping skills and alleviate symptoms.

Reproducible experiments are a major requirement for transparent, comparable and verifiable results in the field of human-robot interaction (HRI). Furthermore, a version-controlled and well-structured "ready to deploy" system setup of soft- and hard-ware for an HRI experiment opens up a range of innovative possibilities for interdisciplinary efforts as well as simplified participation of collaborators in the research community. However, making experiments reproducible is not a trivial task. It stems from the lack of agreed upon methodologies, tools and the inherent technical complexity. In this work we present our latest efforts in the context of an international and interdisciplinary research project to enable robotics researchers, software engineers, and social scientists to work together to reproduce a behavioral HRI experiment. The successful reproduction demonstrates that our tool chain approach meets the proposed requirements of the reproducibility problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time an integrated systemic approach allowed an identical instantiation of a complete HRI experiment at geographically distributed locations.

While researchers expect it will be technologically possible for robots to be widely available in society in the near future, the public shows negative attitudes toward robots that may impede their acceptance. Intergroup contact theory shows that positive contact with an outgroup reduces prejudice and increases positive emotions towards that outgroup. This was applied to an interaction between a participant and a humanoid robot to determine if those who interacted directly with, including touching, the robot would perceive all robots in a more positive manner and be more willing to interact with them. Results indicated that contact with the robot, compared with the Control condition, produced a marginally higher willingness to interact with robots.

Computer vision techniques that can anticipate people»s actions ahead of time could create more responsive and natural human-robot interaction systems. In this paper, we present a new human gesture forecasting framework for human-drone interaction. Our primary motivation is that despite growing interest in early recognition, little work has tried to understand how people experience these early recognition-based systems, and our human-drone forecasting framework will serve as a basis for conducting this human subjects research in future studies. We also introduce a new dataset with 22 videos of two human-drone interaction scenarios, and use it to test our gesture forecasting approach. Finally, we suggest follow-up procedures to investigate people»s experience in interacting with these early recognition-enabled systems.

Introduction: Elderly persons often suffer from depression, without anyone around them noticing. Depression is more common at physically ill elderly person then at their physically healthy contemporary. It is important mental health problem of developed society, because it is still faintly revealed thus insufficiently treated. Objective: To explore the existence of geriatric depression in elderly persons living on their own and those who live in family environment. Materials and methods: The research included 200 elderly respondents, experimental group made of elderly persons (>65 years) living alone. Control group included elderly persons living in a family environment. Universal geriatric questionnaire was made for this research. To assess the presence of depression at respondents we used “The scale of geriatric depression”. Results: The average age (±SD) was 75,4±6,2 years in the experimental group, while in the control group the average age was 74,9±5,6 years. In the experimental group there is significantly larger number of elderly persons that are neglected (p=0,001). Elderly respondents surrounded by loneliness are more depressive than elderly living in the family environment. Statistically geriatric depression is significantly connected with inability for everyday activities, with decreased result of cognitive abilities and indicated result of dementia (P=0.001). Conclusion: Depression is an important mental health problem of the developed society, because it is still faintly discovered and by that insufficiently treated. Organizing approach to different aspects of geriatric health, doctors of the primary protection can improve care of their elderly patients.

Introduction: Quality of life in patients with acute pharyngitis or tonsillitis is significantly lower than in healthy persons, and it should be taken into account when efficacy of new therapeutic options is investigated. Objective: The aim of this study was to develop and validate a reliable instrument that can measure quality of life in adult outpatients with sore throat caused by acute pharyngitis or acute tonsillitis. Method: The study was of a cross-sectional type, and assessed reliability and validity of newly developed questionnaire for measurement of quality of life in adult outpatients with sore throat (STQoL) caused by acute pharyngitis or acute tonsillitis. It was conducted on a sample of 282 patients, with mean age 39.0 ± 14.8 years, male/female ratio 104/178 (36.9%/63.1%). Results: Final version of the STQoL scale with 21 items showed excellent reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha 0.949. It was temporally stable, and both divergent and convergent validity tests had good results. Factorial analysis revealed three domains, Social/psychic aspects, Physical aspects and Environmental aspects of sore throat related quality of life. Conclusions: The STQoL scale is reliable and valid specific instrument for measuring sore throat related quality of life, which is an important treatment outcome in patients with acute pharyngitis or tonsillitis.