FLOSSA: An Application for Improving the Interaction Between Patient and a Humanoid Robot in a Dental Care Scenario

With aims to generate evidence-based insights into interactions involving a social humanoid robot, care recipients, and nursing students within the Swedish-Finnish minority community in Finland, project MäRI was initiated by a consortium of two Finnish institutions. To facilitate this, an application named FLOSSA was developed for Sanbot’s commercial social robot Elf (manufactured by Qihan Technology Co. Ltd). Given the limited research on social and humanoid robots, especially on the Sanbot Elf robot, ensuring that FLOSSA effectively supports the MäRI’s objectives, Elf and the application must have robust communication capabilities. This required developing and deploying Swedish language interaction for the robot Elf through advanced speech synthesis and recognition technologies. This work outlines the development process of the FLOSSA application, which comprises four key software components. (1) A server implementation utilizing Google’s speech services facilitates seamless robot communication in Swedish. Additionally, (2) a web application based on an interaction tree serves as a user-friendly graphical interface for engaging with the robot. (3) An event streaming server alongside an Android application, leveraging Sanbot’s provided tools, animates Elf during user interactions and (4) the graphical interface. Together, these components ensure that both Elf and FLOSSA are fully serviceable to meet the objectives of Project MäRI.