Practical Development of a Robot to Assist Cognitive Reconstruction in Psychiatric Day Care

One of the important roles of social robots is to support mental health through conversations with people. In this study, we focused on the column method to support cognitive restructuring, which is also used as one of the programs in psychiatric day care, and to help patients think flexibly and understand their own characteristics. To develop a robot that assists psychiatric day care patients in organizing their thoughts about their worries and goals through conversation, we designed the robot's conversation content based on the column method and implemented its autonomous conversation function. This paper reports on the preliminary experiments conducted to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of this prototype system in an actual psychiatric day care setting, and on the comments from participants in the experiments and day care staff.