The robot course: an investigation of how large, inflatable, soft robots can be used for therapy.

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When it comes to therapy, talking is often ineffective when people shut down, zone out, become upset, disruptive, or chaotic. This is particularly the case for young people, individuals who experience severe anxiety or have history of emotional abuse. A unique program, the HorseCourse, has emerged in Dorset to address this. The HorseCourse helps people to become calm and focused by learning to communicate with specially trained horses from the ground. The programs train people to recognize and manage emotions causing them to become disengaged, chaotic, shut down or aggressive. TheHorseCourse is a revolutionary approach to mental health/self-regulation with excellent impact evidence [https://www.thehorsecourse.org/images/pdfs/TheHorseCourse_Evidence_Summary.pdf]. However, training with real horses, although it being highly successful, presents some challenge to scaling the approach. The goal of this project is to investigate the use of animal robots to reproduce the benefits of the HorseCourse. The project resonates particularly well with a new type of robot, large inflatable ones, which start to be investigated in multiple places in the world for their benefit to user interaction. A current collaboration with AirGiant, a local company, building inflatable giant, has demonstrated that the robot has a unique affordance (being soft, large, and squishy) which can be exploited to create original interaction with humans.The key research question for this project is to investigate if this is possible to reproduce the benefits of the HorseCourse through an inflatable robot. To address this a number of sub-objectives can be tackled: 1) a systematic review of what factors have been investigated in animal therapy, as well as how the field of robotic has explore this question before; 2) a series of user evaluations to better understand the factors at play in the HorseCourse program; 3) the development and implementation of a soft robot which implement the observations seen in previous steps; 4) an evaluation of the final robot design with end-users.