Exploring the Use of Social Robots in Promoting University Students’ Mental Well-Being

Abstract

Mental health problems within university student populations are a growing concern. In recent years, university students have reported increased symptoms of stress and anxiety, which can negatively impact their mental well-being and academic performance. However, many students do not seek or receive support for these challenges. With recent technological advances in social robots and their expanding capabilities, there is potential for social robots to extend and complement mental health care interventions and enhance access to care. This thesis introduces a novel application of social robots in robot-assisted interventions for addressing stress and anxiety in social situations. As an initial step to developing effective technology-based interventions, it is essential to identify design elements and functionalities that are perceived as engaging and useful by students. Therefore, our first study explores students’ perceptions of, and preferences for, using different types of intelligent agents (e.g., virtual agents, social robots, etc.) to support their mental well-being, specifically to cope with feelings of stress and anxiety in social situations typically encountered within a university context (e.g., engaging in a group discussion, delivering presentations, expressing opinions, etc.). Two online surveys were conducted: a pilot study on Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 85) and a larger study at the University of Waterloo (N = 1054). The results provide insights into different design elements (e.g., confidentiality, accessibility and enjoyment) as well as social and technical capabilities (e.g., ability to understand conversation) to consider when designing intelligent agents to help address stress and anxiety among university students. The results also showed that public speaking is one of the most anxiety-provoking social situations at university, and animal-like robots were the most selected agents among the given choices of different types of intelligent agents to use for managing anxiety related to the students' most anxiety-provoking social situations. Participants also endorsed a variety of activities that they thought could be beneficial for managing anxiety related to their most anxiety-provoking situation, including receiving personalized coaching for activities and tasks that support mental well-being (e.g., meditation and yoga), getting help with thinking calming or positive thoughts, and getting help with building confidence, for which they indicated to be willing to use an intelligent agent. In the next step, we used the findings of our first study to design a robotic mental well-being coach aimed at assisting university students in managing public speaking anxiety. To this end, in our second study, we conducted collaborative co-design sessions with five mental health professionals (the envisioned secondary users) to identify the design-related needs, including robot behaviours and interactions. We employed a co-design approach to ensure that the design of the robot's behaviours and functionalities is grounded in evidence-based practices and aligns with the best practices of psychological support in this application area that can be delivered by a robotic coach. Furthermore, we carried out a participatory study involving six university students (the envisioned primary users) to gather their opinions for further improvements to the robotic coach. Students provided feedback on the behaviours and functionality of the robot and generally found the robot engaging, relaxing, knowledgeable, and beneficial for learning relaxation exercises. Lastly, after implementing final improvements to the behaviour and functionalities of the robotic coach based on feedback from students and with the assistance of mental health professionals, we conducted our third study with university students (N=50) to evaluate the usability and acceptability of the robotic mental well-being coach designed in the second study to help university students manage their public speaking anxiety. The findings demonstrated a usability score of 84.05 for the robotic coach and high acceptability among university students who perceived the robot as competent and knowledgeable. In addition, a significant improvement in participants' self-reported moods was observed following the study. The qualitative analysis suggests that university students had a positive impression of the robotic mental well-being coach and their interaction. Overall, the findings of this study are encouraging and indicate the potential of social robots as mental well-being coaches to support university students' public speaking anxiety. Future research should investigate the users' experiences and the effectiveness of the robotic mental well-being coach in assisting university students to cope with public speaking anxiety in the long term over multiple interaction sessions.