Dominic Reeve Undergraduate Dissertation 2016/17

Paro Bot and Loneliness

Supervised by A.Sharkey

Abstract

Loneliness is something which is experienced by most people at some point in their lives. It can have negative effects on the sufferers' health as well as general wellbeing. It is known that animal-assisted therapy and owning pets helps to reduce the effects of loneliness. Recently social robots which, are made to look like animals have become more readily available. Given that these robots look and act like animals, this paper tests to see if they can be used in the same was as animal-assisted therapy. In this paper the Paro is the robot being used to test the hypothesis.

The experiment consisted of a literature survey to collate current information regarding the background of the project and the experiments used and their results. The experiment had two sections, an online survey and a human study. The results from this study did not reject the null hypothesis, this could be down to some constraints in the experiment. This are is still very promising so the final section on this paper is the further work in the field and how to improve on the experiment.