Assistive Robots for Healthcare and Human-Robot Interaction: 3rd Edition
A Special Issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220) belonging to the section "Sensors and Robotics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2026) | Viewed by 5092
Editors
Interests: geriatrics; neurocognitive disorders; psychological and behavioural symptoms; information and communication technologies; ambient assisted living
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: genetics; pharmacology; cognition disorders; neurodegenerative diseases; memory; clinical neuropsychology; cognitive neuropsychology; executive function; cognitive neuroscience; learning and memory
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Assistive technologies such as Assistive Robots (ARs) could support the process of care giving, potentially enhancing patient well-being and decreasing the workload of caregivers. However, research concerning person-centered care, multimodal interaction, multimodal data collection, and caregiver expectancy models must be performed in order to improve the acceptability of ARs.
As such, the field of Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) is devoted to understanding, designing, and assessing the robotic systems utilized by human beings.
By definition, this interaction requires communication, thus, research in the field of HRI is increasingly focused on the development of robots equipped with intelligent communicative abilities, particularly speech-based natural-language conversational abilities. These efforts directly relate to the research area of computational linguistics, which is generally defined as “the subfield of computer science concerned with using computational techniques to learn, understand, and produce human language content”. The advances and results obtained in computational linguistics provide a foundation for the development of so-called Spoken Dialogue Systems, i.e., computer systems designed to interact with humans using spoken natural language. The ability to communicate using natural language is a fundamental requirement for a robot that interacts with human beings, as spoken dialogue is generally considered the most natural means of social human–robot interaction. Because sensing technologies play a key role in HRI, novel approaches or the application of existing techniques in a novel way may lead to advances in this and related fields.
This Special Issues aims to advance the application of novel technologies in healthcare processes that have shown exceptional promise in HRI via the use of new sensors or methodologies that are able to adapt, combine or enhance the existing ones. Therefore, this Special Issue welcomes the submission of articles that address concerns regarding the modalities needed to sense the emotional state of people by robots, and those related to modelling the interaction between humans and robots at both the haptic and emotional level.
Dr. Grazia D'Onofrio
Dr. Daniele Sancarlo
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- development of new sensing methodologies to facilitate HRI
- improvement of existing technologies in HRI
- application of multimodal approaches in HRI
- role of emotional detection in HRI
- ethical aspects of HRI
- sensitive design in care robotics
- patient centeredness
- acceptability and usability assessment
- impact of robot embodiment and how this affects interactions
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Related Special Issues
- Assistive Robots for Healthcare and Human-Robot Interaction in Sensors (13 articles)
- Assistive Robots for Healthcare and Human-Robot Interaction: Volume II in Sensors (9 articles)
