Social Assistive Robot for Cardiac Rehabilitation: A Pilot Study with Patients with Angioplasty

Socially Assistive Robots (SAR) have been gaining significant attention in multiple health care applications. However, SAR has not been fully explored in cardiac rehabilitation (CR). One of the most critical issues in CR is the lack of adherence of patients to the rehabilitation process. Hence, based on the evidence that the presence of an embodied agent increases compliance, we present in this paper the integration of a social robot in a CR programme. The setup is evaluated with four patients divided into two conditions (robot and no robot), in order to evaluate its first four sessions as a preliminary study. The results show that this system might have a promising impact on CR and holds promise to be extended to a larger group of patients.