Alexis Block
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Engineering·Early-career
In the United States, new patients often wait six to eight months to see a mental health provider. That wait can leave people facing grief, anxiety, or severe distress without support when they need it most.
- Fields
Engineering
Computer Science
Psychology
- Topics
human-robot interaction
social robotics
affective computing
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2031
What they work on
- Develop interpretable models that infer a person's emotional state from off-body signals such as heart rate, breathing rate, speech prosody (vocal rhythm and tone), facial thermal patterns, and posture.
- Design supportive robot behaviors, including therapist-guided spoken responses and a gesture library built from annotated videos and motion-capture data of people comforting each other.
- Integrate sensing and behavior modules into an adaptive, closed-loop system that lets miniature humanoid and industrial robots adjust touch and speech as a user's emotions change.
- Evaluate the robot system in controlled user studies that measure perceived empathy, how appropriate the responses seem, and users' emotional outcomes.
More about the research
Good emotional support usually combines words with physical gestures, such as a comforting touch. Most current technologies, however, only respond with text or voice. They also cannot read emotional signals. This project asks whether robots can notice when someone is distressed and respond with supportive speech, gestures, and gentle touch.
Why it matters
People facing long waits for mental health care, including those coping with grief or anxiety, could benefit from robots that sense distress and offer comforting words and touch. Such robots might help users manage their emotions and feel socially supported. The open datasets and tools from this project could also support future work on assistive and mental-health technologies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Desmond Ong
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Computer Science·Early-career
Define types of emotional reasoning, such as predicting emotions from situations and mental states and reasoning about interventions that change emotions, drawing on psychological theory.
Jane Huang
University of Notre Dame, IN·Computer Science
Design human-centered interfaces that help teams supervise autonomous drone swarms in time-critical tasks such as disaster response, using cognitive work analysis and iterative user-centered design.
Myunghee Kim
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Build and evaluate a personalized robotic prosthesis for people with below-knee amputations that combines adaptive optimization with biofeedback so assistance adjusts in real time to each user's movement patterns.
The school
Case Western Reserve University: 34 labs on PI Pages, $643M a year on research, 213 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.