IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2019 - 11

Research) that aims to provide robot-
enhanced therapy for improving social
skills in children with ASD. This
work shows the need for and chal-
lenges of an interdisciplinary vision.
The system was built with the help of
psychotherapists, cognitive scien-
tists, roboticists, computer scientists,
and ethicists, allowing control of the
robot to go beyond classic remote-con-
trol methods (such as the Wizard of Oz
interface), while ensuring safe and ethi-
cal robot behavior.
Today, a growing population of older
adults is at increased risk of being
socially isolated and lonely. In addition
to providing physical and cognitive
care, monitoring, and training, social
robots could play a role that increases
vulnerable people's quality of life. In
this context, the fifth article, "Older
Adults Living With Social Robots: Pro-
moting Social Connectedness in

Long-Term Communities," describes a
study that provides an integrated par-
ticipatory design and community-
based approach. The authors' work
demonstrates the importance of
research with an emphasis on older
adults' direct experience using social
robots to understand group change and
empower aging people to think critical-
ly about their preferences for social-
robot functions and design. The initial
results show how a social robot (in this
case, the Jibo robot) can be a conversa-
tion-facilitating tool, promote engage-
ment and interaction at the group level,
and increase social connectedness in an
older adult population. These are inter-
esting results that should be explored
further in future research efforts.
When robots work in human-cen-
tered environments, interacting with
humans and standing at the service of
various vulnerable populations, concerns

related to ethics and data privacy and
protection are of paramount importance.
The final article, "Robots and Transpar-
ency: The Multiple Dimensions of
Transparency in the Context of Robot
Technologies," tries to address the multi-
dimensional levels of the European
Union's General Data Protection Regula-
tion's transparency requirements for
robot technologies. The authors discuss
several privacy issues that need attention
when working with robots capable of
perceiving a whole environment but
without unnecessarily preventing the
humans within these settings from real-
izing the full benefit of robotic assistance.
The article considers challenges and leg-
islative rules involving transparency. The
message is that transparency in human-
robot interaction is an underexplored
field presenting many challenges that
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