This project was part of a CS7633 Human Robot Interaction study for a course. Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) have emerged as a viable tool for offering emotional and social assistance to those suffering from stress. Previous research has demonstrated that these robots work well to help stressed-out teenagers over a prolonged period of time.
The project aim was to evaluate the effectiveness of Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) in lowering stress levels among college students.
This required us to modify a Vector Anki robot to suit the study and make a GUI for the participants to control the robot!
We conduct our experiment aimed at assessing the efficacy of stress reduction through the use of a robot amongst college students. The experiment starts with an initial survey to determine the stress profile of the participants. Initially, we get a Perceived Stress Score (PSS) of the participants to gauge their stress levels in the past 2 weeks.
The study was conducted over 2 days as a within groups study. Participants were made to watch a funny video as a baseline. Then their heart beats per minute were measured before and after the game to corelate with their stress levels.
In the next scenario, they had to play with the robot helping it navigate a maze to see how that helps reduce their stress levels. Their heart beats per minute were measured again before and after this activity to corelate with their stress levels.
The study was conducted over 2 days as a within groups study. Participants were made to interact with the robot and a were made to watch a funny video as a baseline. Then their heart beats per minute were measured before and after these activities to corelate with their stress levels.
Even though we found a trend of more decrease in stress levels in the robot interaction, the p-value for the results was greater than 0.5. Thus, we were not able to reject our null hypotheses.
Conclusion
Our results indicate that SARs may be effective in reducing stress levels among college students when compared to conventional stress-relieving methods such as watching YouTube videos. However, statistical significance was not achieved, possibly due to various factors such as a small sample size of fifteen participants, which may have limited our ability to detect significant differences.
