Keynotes | K&Ts | GACs | Talks | Posters | Search

Poster A in Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 4, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Reaching for Emotion Regulation with Reachy Mini

Aarat Satsangi¹, Sara Lahourpour¹, Apurva Narayan¹; ¹University of Western Ontario

Presenter: Aarat Satsangi

Cognitive neuroscience models often lack ecological validity due to constrained laboratory environments and thus fail to generalize to real-world clinical deployments. To bridge this gap, we propose an extensible bedside companion utilizing the Reachy Mini robot. Our ultimate vision is an embodied system that holistically assesses patient physiological and cognitive-affective states, autonomously alerts medical personnel to anomalies, and improves clinical outcomes while serving as an 'ecological laboratory' for naturalistic data collection. As a foundational step toward this vision, we continuously monitor a user's emotional state in unconstrained settings using Electroencephalography (EEG), video, and speech. Upon detecting negative emotional shifts, a Large Language Model (LLM) triggers targeted cognitive interventions: auditory stimuli (music), semantic information processing (news), a collaborative story-building game, and a targeted cognitive assessment: Montreal Cognitive Assessment-Blind, ultimately demonstrating the viability of embodied AI for emotion regulation and real-world data capture.

Topic Area: Development, Individual Differences & Clinical Populations