A sociable robot as a psychotherapist

Normally regarding control of robotics one studies how to control the robot, for example, how to plan and control its motions; however, in the current paper we pretend to teach the robot how to control people. Nowadays humanoid robots are being harnessed to new kinds of tasks unknown before, such as amusement, a function that was intended for pets, for example. One of the practical uses of robots-humanoids might be in guiding blind people, thereby substituting for guide dogs. The guided-humanoids would have algorithms that plan motion, GPS built-in sensors, and video cameras. The proposed system will be controlled by a smart-phone monitor and will be voice-controlled. On the other hand, the CBT - Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, a relatively new psychotherapy methodology, has become a more prevalent practice, justifying its computerization. These interdisciplinary considerations led to additional progress, resulting in trained robots, namely, robots that communicate according to the CBT methodology, by also using another conversation mode: gesturing. This methodology is based on computer-assisted (now extended to humanoid-assisted) cognitive behavioral therapy methodology (CBT). CBT was originally developed for psychological treatment and is often used to reveal and treat personality disorders. This methodology can also be used to evaluate the reliability of a witness. CBT methodology assumes that the cognitive thoughts of people are expressed by their language. In the literature, about ten categories of thoughts have been determined, and so-called distorted thoughts indicate a behavioral deviation. Based on the above assumption, it is possible to map thoughts, including distorted thoughts and analyze them methodically with the help of linguistic tools. Thus, these tools will be able to scan the mapping of an individual's thoughts and discover distorted thoughts as classified by the CBT method. We will use extreme situations as examples to illustrate distorted thoughts. The mentioned situations will refer to time description (always, never), location (everywhere, nowhere), quantity (everything, nothing, nobody), possibility (must, forced, incapable), among others. These types of expressions leave no doubt as to their meaning. The social-robot's role is to find some textual forms (distorted thoughts) and replace them by other textual forms (corrected, proposed texts). The theoretical background and its implementation will be demonstrated herein.