HandHygieneBots

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The HandHygieneBots Proof of Concept proposal aims to develop social robots as socially engaging and educational technologicalagents that can autonomously interact with children in schools to positively change their handwashing behavior. Globally, nearly halfa million children die every year due to gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases, while handwashing with soap has the potential toprevent up to 50% of these deaths. More recently, due to COVID-19, handwashing has consistently been identified as one of the mostimpactful public health interventions to help halt the spread of the virus. This project aims to develop a tool to help boost populationhealth through optimization and deployment of an autonomous social robot (WallBo) to teach and supervise regular and appropriatehandwashing among children in school contexts. We are at TRL stage 4 with our innovation and have spent the past year developingthe idea, and checking our assumptions through successful human-operated trials. As part of the ERC SOCIAL ROBOTS project, fromwhich the HandHygieneBots project has grown, we have laid crucial foundational work regarding the ingredients of successful andsustained human-robot engagement. Through this project, we aim to develop and investigate the feasibility of our innovation as acommercial proposition. The main objectives of this project are: (1) to develop and refine the mmWave radar autonomous trackingtechnology; (2) to conduct feasibility studies in 4 schools across 2 continents and socioeconomic contexts, to maximize the suitabilityand impact of this innovation for communities most in need; and (3) to advance commercialization of this research by developing theWallBo social robot into a product with the potential to benefit European and global society more broadly. Project outcomes willcontribute towards informing the design of future social robotic products, especially those that can support large scale public healthinterventions.