BeeBot: A Robot that Help Children Manage Their Blood Glucose in a Friendly Way Abigail Osorio Communication Department Pontifical Catholic University of Peru Lima, Peru a20141083@pucp.edu.pe Sebastian Caballa Engineering Department Pontifical Catholic University of Peru Lima, Peru scaballa@pucp.edu.pe ABSTRACT Obesity is a major problem affecting children around the world. In many cases this condition leads to an even more serious disease, diabetes, a condition for which the child and his or her family must create new habits and purchase medical devices. BeeBot is an affordable robot that helps children with diabetes and obesity who are unfamiliar with or afraid of using a glucometer. It incorporates a glucometer and, in addition, includes a counter to capture the number of glasses of water to be consumed and a special button that, when pressed, will advise the child on the exercise he or she can do. Finally, it has two buttons that the child can press depending on whether or not the child has met the day's goal, whether it is the number of glasses of water or the recommended exercise. All the information can be monitored by the parent through an app. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing • Human computer interaction • Interaction devices • Touch screens • Displays and images • Sound-based input/output devices KEYWORDS Social Robot; Obesity; Diabetes; Life Style; Children-centered Design ACM Reference format: Abigail Osorio and Sebastian Caballa. 2023. BeeBot: A Robot that Helps Children Manage Their Blood Glucose in a Friendly Way. In Proceedings of 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’23 Companion), March 13-16, 2023, Stockholm, Sweden. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3568294.3580197 1 INTRODUCTION According to the World Health Organization obesity is a preventable condition that affects 39 million children under the age of 5 (2020). Childhood obesity is associated with the risk of developing diabetes, hypertension, insulin resistance, among other problems [1]. Only in Peru, Pan American Health Organization indicates that at least 3 out of 10 children are overweight after Covid-19 pandemic. [2]. Families who have children diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes constantly need to monitor its health parameters and promote healthy habits. Further, non-personal blood glucose monitoring [3] and lancet device needle fear [4] are aspects that concern parents. For this, interactive robots are presented as an alternative to motivate children on self-management of their condition and diet tracking kindly [5, 6, 7, 8]. Nonetheless, these costly and complex systems can be used only in clinical or laboratory settings. BeeBot was created as a robotic assistant that helps children manage their blood glucose in a friendly way from home. In addition, it helps to combat and prevent obesity problems while promoting healthy habits in children from lower income countries. 2 DESIGN PROCESS BeeBot was created by using IDEO’s human-centered design methodology [9]. The process starts with understanding people who the designer tries to reach. Then, for the ideation phase multiple solutions are presented. Finally, a prototype is built and tested iteratively for the implementation. In the field of robotics, it is important to begin by empathizing with users to design experiences with social robots [10]. The idea comes from a comment from Carla (5 years old), a Type 1 diabetic girl who recently was noticed about her condition. The early days she was afraid of finger prick pain, until her mother said that the lancet device is like a bee, a special insect who works with flowers to create a better world. Beebot uses this analogy for the design proposal. On Figure X, sketch drawings for the physical appearance of the robot are shown. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. HRI '23 Companion, March 13–16, 2023, Stockholm, Sweden © 2023 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9970-8/23/03… $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3568294.3580197 841