Building Relationships: A Scoping Review of Empathy in Human-Robot Interaction.

With advances in robotics and artificial intelligence, the use of social robots has been increasing across diverse environments. However, successfully integrating social robotics into the healthcare space requires an understanding of what drives successful human-robot empathy. In this paper we present a scoping review with the objective of understanding the features and functions of social robots needed to drive successful emotive human-robot interaction in healthcare. Results of the review indicate that the traits and capabilities required of robots can be understood to either draw empathy from users or display empathy to users. Both categories must be used to successfully build empathetic relationships between humans and social robots. The paper ends by discussing how the findings from the review are currently being used to create a set of empathetic design heuristics.