Abstract:

Breathing exercises as part of “mindfulness” and “meditation” have many health benefits including relaxation and stress reduction. They are a valuable pedagogical method in higher education and can be used during breaks in teaching or before examinations for stress relief. Especially in the times of the COVID pandemic, which has been shown to increase psychological stress of students, ensuring students well-being including stress reduction has become a relevant issue in higher education. Nevertheless, stress reduction methods tend to be rarely applied, mostly due to lack of know-how and experience of teachers in higher education. The purpose of this paper is to explore how humanoid robots can be used to guide breathing exercises with students in the context of higher education.

This paper presents the initial design and programming of a simple breathing exercise with the humanoid robot NAO. The breathing exercise was programmed using the Choregraph software and tested with a small group of eight students (75% female, 25% male) as part of the pilot study during a university course. The application “Breathe and Relax with NAO” was designed as an interactive exercise in which students follow the instructions of the robot. The breathing exercise exploits the multimodal interaction possibilities with the NAO robot including speech, movements, sound and light effects.

The paper describes the design, the programming and the evaluation results of the first version of the application “Breathe and Relax with NAO”. The evaluation results from the pilot study show that students enjoyed interacting with the robot, felt more relaxed after the exercise and reported that their mood improved compared to the state before the exercise. Over 85% of the participants stated that the exercise fulfilled their expectations. In addition, students formulated some valuable recommendations for the improvement of the exercise in the next iterations. The paper reports on these preliminary results in more detail. Finally, the paper discusses possible further developments and applications of humanoid robots as facilitators of stress reduction exercises in the context of higher education with the focus on students well-being in the times of crisis.

Keywords:

Humanoid robot, robot-assisted education, stress reduction, higher education, breathing exercises.