The pandemic lockdown has been hard on tweens, teens and adults of all ages. But its effects have been especially difficult for younger children, who thrive on the kind of physical interaction and social-learning they get at school.
As this pandemic lingers and many schools remain closed, some companies are gearing up to sell robot playmates.
Socially assistive robots, as these automatons are known, are intended to help alleviate loneliness, anxiety and stress in humans—much the same way therapy animals do, but without the mess or unpredictability. Such robots have been used mostly in clinical settings to distract and calm kids before medical procedures, to help children with autism learn social skills and to comfort elderly dementia patients.
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Their effectiveness in clinical settings has been mixed or inconclusive. Research on the use of social robots to quell anxiety in children hasn’t revealed a big upside. A Yale University study that examined the effects of interacting with a socially assistive robot after completing a stressful task found that the kids who interacted with the robot showed greater increases in positive mood than the children in the control group, but negative mood and anxiety didn’t improve.
But now, early childhood development experts and robotics engineers are working together to create robots aimed at helping young children regulate their emotions and develop social and emotional skills at home.
Two companies that are planning to sell social robots for the home this fall were developing them well before the coronavirus pandemic, but now they say the timing couldn’t be better. After all, any parent who has been cooped up with young children for the last few months has probably noticed a rise in meltdowns (I know I have).
Purrble has sensors that cause the robot’s heart rate to slow when it is petted.
Photo: SproutelWhile they have similar goals, they are vastly different in style and price. There’s the Purrble, a $49.99 critter that resembles a teddy bear more than a robot, but is made with sensors that cause the robot’s heart rate to slow when it’s being petted, and to emit a soft purr. It’s designed for children ages 3 to 9. The idea is that if kids learn to comfort something else, they can better learn to regulate their own emotions.
At the high end is Moxie, a robot recommended for kids ages 5 to 10 that speaks in a childlike voice, remembers what it learns from prior conversations, and provides what eerily resembles human empathy. Moxie gives children daily missions that help them practice showing kindness to others. It’s currently priced at $1,499, with a monthly subscription fee of $59.99 after a year to cover maintenance and updates. Moxie is being marketed directly to consumers through its website; Purrble will be available on Amazon in September, its maker says.
Purrble was developed by the Committee for Children, a nonprofit focused on kids’ social and emotional learning, and Petr Slovak, a researcher in human-computer interaction at King’s College London. The nonprofit’s innovation group wanted to see if it could create something to help calm kids without the use of a screen.
“When fidget spinners came out I thought maybe we had lost our opportunity,” said Mia Doces, vice president of innovation at the Committee for Children. But those little gadgets fell out of favor rather quickly and the group pressed on, developing a prototype that it tested with 15 families over two years. The results, though limited, were promising enough to encourage them to commercialize it. The nonprofit partnered with Sproutel, a firm that has designed robot toys for children with cancer and diabetes, to refine the product, which initially resembled a potato. Sproutel co-founder Aaron Horowitz said his experience growing up with human-growth-hormone deficiency and having to get shots every day, led him to want to make medical procedures less frightening for children, so he created a degree in mechatronics in college so he could learn how to design socially assistive robots.
But why buy a furry robot when you can get a cat or a puppy (which many people have done during the pandemic)?
“A robot doesn’t dirty a litter box,” said Margaret Trost, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, who has conducted a review of the research on social robots. “They’re not meant to replace pets; they are designed to cause specific changes in a human.”
‘My son really latched onto the Purrble in a way I was really surprised by,’ Annalise Cohen said of her 6-year-old.
Photo: Annalise CohenAnnalise Cohen, a mother of two in Providence, R.I., said her 6-year-old son had been having excessive temper tantrums, so when a friend who knows people at Sproutel asked if she’d like to test the Purrble last month, she agreed to give it a try.
“My son really latched onto the Purrble in a way I was really surprised by. He’s never taken to any plush toys,” she said.
Ms. Cohen used to send her son to his room when he had a tantrum and advise him to take deep breaths. Now, she tells him to find Purrble and explains that the little critter can’t calm down until he does. Ms. Cohen said she has noticed fewer outbursts from her son in recent weeks. “I don’t know if it’s entirely Purrble-related but the timing seems to correspond,” she said.
Dr. Slovak, the researcher who helped develop Purrble, said he plans to begin a bigger study in the fall with the hope of proving it as a therapeutic tool. “We have anecdotal evidence that it works but in order to get the clinical community interested, there’s a robustness of data we need to have,” he said.
That has been the limitation of the research on socially assistive robots in general. Dr. Trost, the pediatrician, said the science behind many studies on robots’ effectiveness in reducing children’s distress and pain in medical settings isn’t very good. The sample size in many studies was too small and some didn’t include a control group.
“I think it’s a very promising field, but it’s nascent,” Dr. Trost said.
Is there a possibility that these new robots could end up being too effective, causing kids to prefer robots to people?
Paolo Pirjanian, chief executive of Embodied Inc., the company that makes Moxie, said the robot was designed with that possibility in mind; it powers down if a child tries to use it for more than two hours a day. Parents also can use an app to set a bedtime and wake-up time for the robot. “We will not allow your child to binge on Moxie,” said Dr. Pirjanian, the former CTO at Roomba vacuum maker iRobot who founded Embodied in 2016 because he wanted to develop a product that would help families.
“Social-emotional development is under-amplified in our society, even though studies show emotional skills are as important or more important to having happiness in life,” he said.
Moxie is the company’s first and only product so far.
Jennifer Nishizaki hopes Moxie might help her 5- and 8-year-old children learn not to interrupt one another.
Photo: Jennifer NishizakiThe robot conducts relaxation exercises with children, learns their names, asks them about their day and offers comfort by asking kids if they want to squeeze its hand.
Jennifer Nishizaki, a mother of two in Pasadena, Calif., is testing Moxie for a year. She said it’s too soon to know what effect the robot will have, but she’s hoping Moxie might help her 5- and 8-year-olds learn not to interrupt one another and to slow down when they are talking.
“Simple turn-taking and conversational skills might improve because Moxie can’t understand if they are talking over each other. That’s a lot of what they learn in school and they’ll be losing that in the fall,” she said, since their school district is opening with remote learning. “This is the time when we need robot buddies.”
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