The Effects of Robot-Enhanced Psychotherapy: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Through this meta-analysis we aimed to provide an estimation of the overall effect of robot-enhanced therapy on psychological outcome for different populations, to provide average effect sizes on different outcomes, such as cognitive, behavioral and subjective, and to test possible moderators of effect size. From a total of 861 considered studies for this meta-analysis, only 12 were included because of the lack of studies that have reported quantitative data in this area and because of their primary focus on describing the process of robotic development rather than measuring psychological outcomes. We calculated Cohen's d effect sizes for every outcome measure for which sufficient data were reported. The results show that robot-enhanced therapy yielded a medium effect size overall and, specifically on the behavioral level, indicating that 69% of patients in the control groups did worse than the average number of participants in the intervention group. More studies are needed with regard to specific outcomes to prove the efficacy of robot-enhanced therapy, but the overall results clearly support the use of robot-enhanced therapy for different populations.