Healthy Pepper: Nutritional Education through Social Robotics and Storytelling

Childhood overweight and obesity represent an alarming problem worldwide with strong consequences both at health and social levels. Learning based on storytelling is an effective approach to enhancing children's knowledge and correct behaviors, especially when it is conveyed by engaging novel technologies. Among these technologies, social robots have a special appeal for educational purposes. The paper presents a pilot project in which the social robot Pepper is used as an educational storyteller in the context of nutrition. To investigate the appropriateness of the approach, a preliminary study was performed to compare the effects of Pepper vs a human storyteller. Results are interesting in terms of engagement, user experience, trust, and learning of relevant concepts, suggesting that the proposed approach can be effective in this domain.