Facial and vocal emotion expression of a personal computer assistant to engage, educate and motivate children

The general goal of our research is to develop a personal computer assistant that persuades children to adhere to a healthy lifestyle during daily activities at home. The assistant will be used in three different roles: as companion, educator and motivator. This study investigates whether the effectiveness of the computer assistant with an iCat robot embodiment, can be improved when it expresses emotions (tested for each of the three roles). It shows that emotion expressions can improve the effectiveness of the robot to achieve its role objectives. The improvements that we found are small, however, probably due to a ceiling effect: All subjective measures are rated very positively in the neutral condition, thus leaving little room for improvement. It also showed that the emotional speech was less intelligible, which may limit the robots' effectiveness.