Mental disorders including neurodevelopmental diffculties are frequent, creating a substantial disparity between the demand for mental health care and the available resources. The potential of therapeutic technologies to address this treatment gap is immense, offering scalable solutions to enhance access. Yet, the intricate nature of mental disorders, woven with diverse risk factors, poses challenges to a comprehensive understanding of their mechanisms and assessment of this potential. Current assessments of mental disorders heavily rely on the expertise of trained clinicians, making it imperative to explore innovative avenues such as "digital phenotyping" to capture nuanced behaviors. However, integrating technology into healthcare encounters obstacles exacerbated by the divergent cultures of medical professionals and engineers. While technical feasibility is a priority for engineers, it often needs to match the acceptability standards set by healthcare professionals. Navigating the complexity of the healthcare ecosystem compounds the challenge of identifying precise needs. Furthermore, the time-intensive nature of clinical research methods hinders the swift evaluation of effcacy. To surmount these hurdles, we advocate for the incorporation of user-centered design methodologies and participatory research in the development of therapeutic technologies. This chapter delves into the multifaceted challenges of designing technologies, such as robots, for therapeutic programs focused on individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. By proposing solutions that prioritize participatory co-design environments, we aim to empower individuals from diverse backgrounds to collaboratively support those undergoing therapy with technology, ensuring its effcacy and benefts.

Storytelling is an effective evidence-based practice as an accepted intervention by therapists for the therapy of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Digital storytelling, particularly using smart tangibles, offers a structured, interactive and engaging environment for children with ASD allowing for repetition, offering feedback with visual supports, and giving the child more authority over the learning experience. This study presents a co-designed approach to digital storytelling activities with smart tangibles for autism therapy, aimed at enhancing multiple social and behavioral skills. Through co-design sessions with therapists, activity flows and scenarios were developed to target specific skill improvements. These include free play exploration, positive stimulus introduction, fostering cooperation to address disturbances, and incorporating magical objects to facilitate peer turn-taking. Additionally, real-life connections were emphasized to promote emotional regulation and multicultural understanding while further activities are designed to overcome routine issues, build tolerance to change, and enhance cognitive structuring. Feasibility was demonstrated through integration into therapy sessions of five children, where therapists independently utilized the system, fostering immersive and interactive storytelling experiences. Overall, the co-designed activities offer insights into enhancing therapy interventions for children with ASD beyond specific contexts, contributing to the broader design of autism therapy activities.

Affect recognition, or the ability to detect and interpret emotional states, has the potential to be a valuable tool in the field of healthcare. In particular, it can be useful in gamified therapy, which involves using gaming techniques to motivate and keep the engagement of patients in therapeutic activities. This study aims to examine the accuracy of machine learning models using thermal imaging and action unit data for affect classification in a gamified robot therapy scenario. A self-report survey and three machine learning models were used to assess emotions including frustration, boredom, and enjoyment in participants during different phases of the game. The results showed that the multimodal approach with the combination of thermal imaging and action units with LSTM model had the highest accuracy of 77% for emotion classification over a 7-s sliding window, while thermal imaging had the lowest standard deviation among participants. The results suggest that thermal imaging and action units can be effective in detecting affective states and might have the potential to be used in healthcare applications, such as gamified therapy, as a promising non-intrusive method for recognizing internal states.

We present here some lessons learned from observations and applications of child-robot interaction research in diverse ecosystems such as schools, therapy centers, and hospitals, where the interaction was facilitated in real-world circumstances rather than lab settings. Specifically, we use observational results from our reflections on multiple child-robot interaction practices in the wild conducted over a 9-year research period. Using these exploratory studies, we outline some general design considerations and adaptation guidelines for improving the design and implementation of robotic systems in healthcare and education that might lead to more practical, feasible, and ethically sustainable results.

This year's conference theme "HRI for all" not just raises the importance of reflecting on how to promote inclusion for every type of user but also calls for careful consideration of the different layers of people potentially impacted by such systems. In educational setups, for instance, the users to be considered first and foremost are the learners. However, teachers, school directors, therapists and parents also form a more secondary layer of users in this ecosystem. The 7th edition of R4L focuses on the issues that HRI experiments in educational environments may cause to stakeholders and how we could improve on bringing the stakeholders' point of view into the loop. This goal is expected to be achieved in a very practical and dynamic way by the means of: (i) lightening talks from the participants; (ii) two discussion panels with special guests: One with active researchers from academia and industry about their experience and point of view regarding the inclusion of stakeholders; another panel with teachers, school directors, and parents that are/were involved in HRI experiments and will share their viewpoint; (iii) semi-structured group discussions and hands-on activities with participants and panellists to evaluate and propose guidelines for good practices regarding how to promote the inclusion of stakeholders, especially teachers, in educational HRI activities. By acquiring the viewpoint from the experimenters and stakeholders and analysing them in the same workshop, we expect to identify current gaps, propose practical solutions to bridge these gaps, and capitalise on existing synergies with the collective intelligence of the two communities.

This paper describes the first steps of an ongoing participatory design with teachers from Switzerland to co-create Human-Robot Interaction setups for integrating children with migration history. The herein presented phase had two main goals: (i) initially mapping the current issues and the teachers’ strategy when integrating these children, and (ii) understanding teachers’ perceptions regarding social robots for this goal. Results show that teachers we interviewed are already using technology to communicate with immigrant children, not necessarily for inclusion or promote socialisation with their peers, but simply to understand them. Findings also point to a well-defined application of social robots in inclusion activities, even when never seeing or using them, which contradicts previous results in the literature and which gives potential ways to unfold the next steps of the participatory design.

The social aspects of therapy and training are important for patients to avoid social isolation and must be considered when designing a platform, especially for home-based rehabilitation. We proposed an online version of the previously proposed tangible Pacman game for upper limb training with haptic-enabled tangible Cellulo robots. Our main objective is to enhance motivation and engagement through social integration and also to form a gamified multiplayer rehabilitation at a distance. Thus, allowing relatives, children, and friends to connect and play with their loved ones while also helping them with their training from anywhere in the world. As well as connecting therapists to their patients through haptically linking capabilities. This is especially relevant when there are social distancing measures which might isolate the elderly population, a majority of all rehabilitation patients.

Neurodivergent children with cognitive and communicative difficulties often experience a lower level of social integration in comparison to neurotypical children. Therefore it is crucial to understand social inclusion challenges and address exclusion. Since previous work shows that gamified robotic activities have a high potential to enable inclusive and collaborative environments we propose using robot-mediated games for enhancing social inclusion. In this work, we present the design of a multiplayer tangible Pacman game with three different inter-player interaction modalities: semi-dependent collaborative, dependent collaborative, and competitive. The initial usability evaluation and the observations of the experiments show the benefits of the game for creating collaborative and cooperative practices for the players and thus also potential for social interaction and social inclusion. Importantly, we observe that inter-player interaction design affects the communication between the players and their physical interaction with the game.

Brain Computer Interface (BCI) systems have the potential to provide a communication tool using non-invasive signals which can be applied to various fields including neuro-rehabilitation and entertainment. Interpreting multi-class movement intentions in a real time setting to control external devices such as robotic arms remains to be one of the main challenges in the BCI field. We propose a learning framework to decode upper limb movement intentions before and during the movement execution (ME) with the inclusion of motor imagery (MI) trials. The design of the framework allows the system to evaluate the uncertainty of the classification output and respond accordingly. The EEG signals collected during MI and ME trials are fed into a hybrid architecture consisting of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with limited pre-processing. Outcome of the proposed approach shows the potential to anticipate the intended movement direction before the onset of the movement, while waiting to reach a certainty level by potentially observing more EEG data from the beginning of the actual movement before sending control commands to the robot to avoid undesired outcomes. Presented results indicate that both the accuracy and the confidence level of the model improves with the introduction of MI trials right before the movement execution. Our results confirm the possibility of the proposed model to contribute to real-time and continuous decoding of movement directions for robotic applications.