Prosperi Enrico, Guidi Giada, Napoli Christian, Gnessi Lucio, Iocchi Luca
Società Italiana di Educazione Terapeutica, Roma, Italy.
Dip. di Ingegneria Informatica Automatica e Gestionale, Sapienza Università di Roma, Roma, Italy.
Front Robot AI. 2022 Aug 17;9:895039. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2022.895039. eCollection 2022.
Obesity is a chronic multifactorial pathology determined by many factors, including incorrect eating habits and a low level of physical activity. There is an urgent need to promote a persistent change in lifestyle in obese subjects, but very few individuals maintain long-term results achieved after diet therapies. 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. However, only a small portion of patients can maintain participation in such programs and fully benefit from them. Assistive technologies, and in particular assistive social robots, are powerful tools to boost independence and improve participation in educational activities. The aim of the research work described in this article is to evaluate the effect of employing a social robot as a therapeutic educational robot helping the expert therapist in the education activity. This article describes the implementation, deployment, and evaluation of a social educational robot used as a TE assistant. Although we cannot provide statistically significant results due to the limited number of people involved in the experimental protocol, all experimental results show a positive trend, indicating that the robot can enhance the social interactions between the patients and the therapist and among the patients, thus bringing to better overall results of the TE sessions, measured with standard tests for obesity management.
肥胖是一种由多种因素决定的慢性多因素病理状态，这些因素包括不正确的饮食习惯和低水平的身体活动。迫切需要促使肥胖患者的生活方式发生持续改变，但很少有人能维持饮食疗法后取得的长期效果。治疗性教育（TE）作为一种多学科干预措施，在改善生活方式和获取疾病管理新技能方面发挥了重要作用。然而，只有一小部分患者能够持续参与此类项目并从中充分受益。辅助技术，尤其是辅助社交机器人，是增强独立性和提高教育活动参与度的有力工具。本文所述研究工作的目的是评估将社交机器人用作治疗性教育机器人在教育活动中协助专家治疗师的效果。本文描述了用作TE助手的社交教育机器人的实施、部署和评估。尽管由于参与实验方案的人数有限，我们无法提供具有统计学意义的结果，但所有实验结果均呈现出积极趋势，表明该机器人能够增强患者与治疗师之间以及患者之间的社交互动，从而使TE课程在肥胖管理标准测试中的整体效果更佳。
