The HELPER Project’s main goal was to help children between the ages of 4 to 7 deal with postoperative pain during their time in the hospital. This was done by introducing the MiRo-E social robot to them. For younger children, it can be difficult to communicate their pain correctly. Them being afraid and not understanding pain leads to them confusing being in pain with being scared. This misunderstanding can cause them to “overreact”. Furthermore, they can try to hide their pain because they look up to doctors and nurses. By using sensors in a glove, skin conductance is measured, to which a correlation with pain can be made. This way MiRo-E will either play with them, to take their mind off the pain, or when they endure more pain, the robot will try to comfort them.

This project was part of a larger project undertaken by a consortium of people from TU/e, TU Delft, TU Twente & Radboud UMC. Together with these team members I performed multiple user studies with actual children between the ages of 4 to 7. My assistance in setting up these user studies, and gathering and analysing data, was rewarded with two colloquium members assigning me co-authorship on their papers around the topic of human-robot interaction [1, 2].