Owing to the COVID-19 situation, there was an opportunity to record online consultations in the Incontinence Clinic and Sleep Clinic at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Sydney, Australia. Empathy revolves around a wide range of verbal and non-verbal behaviours that include, for example, the choice of words in social dialogues. In order to make ECAs more effective, humanlike empathy expressed during conversation through relational cues is essential.
When it comes to eHealth, ECAs can provide vital support to patients by being more reachable. We also provide concrete methodological recommendations for future research, such as simplifying experimental designs, conducting a priori power analyses and clearer statistical reporting.Įmbodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are virtual agents that exhibit humanlike verbal and non-verbal behaviours. Nonetheless, we demonstrate that it is still possible to perform rigorous analyses despite these challenges. The meta-analysis also revealed a tendency towards under-powered designs, as well as variation in the methods and measures used to define trust. In addition, we found a trend towards the type of measure that was used (subjective or objective) influencing the direction of effects for social trust. There was tentative evidence to suggest that more human-like attributes lead to less competency trust in robots. Children's pro-social attitudes towards social robots were also explored. We constructed four meta-analytic models based on 20 identified studies, drawn from an initial pool of 414 papers, as a means of investigating the effect of robot embodiment and behaviour on both social and competency trust.
We therefore conducted a meta-analysis aimed at identifying factors influencing children's trust in robots. In addition, meta-analyses in child-robot-interaction (cHRI) have yet to be popularly adopted as a method for synthesising results. Although research on children's trust in social robots is increasingly growing in popularity, a systematic understanding of the factors which influence children's trust in robots is lacking.