SanitizerBot: How Human-in-the-Loop Social Robots Can Playfully Support Humans

This paper evaluates a robot that distributed hand-sanitizer over an eight month period (October 2020-June 2021) in public places on the Oregon State University campus. During COVID times, many robots have been deployed in public places as social distancing enforcers, food delivery robots, UV-sanitation robots and more, but few studies have assessed the social situations of these robots. Using the context of robot distributing hand sanitizer, this work explores the benefits that social robots may provide to encouraging healthy human activities, as well as ways in which street-performance inspired approaches and a bit of humor might improve the quality and experience of functional human-robot interactions. After gaining human-in-the-loop deployment experience with a customized interface to enable both planned and improvized responses to human bystanders, we run two sub-studies. In the first, we compare the performance of the robot (moving or still) relative to a traditional hand sanitizer dispenser stick (N=2048, 3 week data collection period). In the second, we evaluate how varied utterance strategies further impact the interaction results (N=185, 2 week data collection period). The robot dramatically outperforms the stick dispenser across all tracked behavioral variables, cuing high levels of positive social engagement. This work finds the utterance design is more complex socially, and offer insights to future robot designers about how to integrate helpful and playful speech into service robot interactions. Finally, across both sub-studies, the work shows that people in groups are more likely to engage with the robot and each other, as well as sanitize their hands. © 2022 IEEE.

University Students' Daily Activities and Physical Fitness during COVID-19 Pandemic

This study aims to evaluate university students' daily activities and the effect of physical activity on physical fitness, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research used comparative and correlational research methods. Thirty research samples consisted of 13 junior year university students and 17 senior year university students were selected by the purposive sampling method. Every student was monitored for their daily activities for one week and categorized into sports, college, organization, and other activities. Physical fitness was measured using the MFT test to measure the VO2Max in ml/kg/min units. The data analysis results showed no significant difference between junior and senior semester students in VO2Max, physical exercise, organizational activities, lecture activities, sleeping, and other activities. There was a significant difference in VO2Max and physical exercises (sig < 0.05) between genders. Male students spent more time exercising (17.87 ± 11.1) than female students (10.80 ± 6.04). Furthermore, male students had a higher average VO2Max (42.38 ± 7.53) than female students (29.36 ± 6.07). Based on the regression analysis results, there is a significant value between physical exercises and sleeping toward VO2Max capacity (sig. < 0.05). © 2022 by authors.

Psychological risk factors for healthcare professionals in the epidemic process

In this study, it is aimed to describe the increased psychological risk factors for healthcare professionals who perform their duties with great devotion during the epidemic process. This article, was prepared by making use of the studies in the literature, aimed to examine the factors that prepare healthcare professionals to address increased stress and burnout during the epidemic process. It describes the factors that cause burnout and depersonalization among healthcare workers in the process of providing health services, that increased in the epidemic process and perhaps, gain new dimensions. Risk factors faced by emergency personnel are always present in daily operations but can increase in the epidemic process. In this context, the importance of increasing the psychological resilience of healthcare professionals and providing them with psycho-social support is emphasised as is the importance of maintaining quality in health care. It is considered that the provision of mental health professionals who will provide continuous support for healthcare professionals in the institution should be among the mandatory occupational health and safety measures. © Asia Pacific Journal of Health Management 2020. All rights reserved.