Ommie

Overview:

Ommie is a robot developed by Kayla Matheus, Marynel Vazquez, and Brian Scassellati designed to support mental health, specifically those with anxiety. Ommie’s core interaction is to support deep breathing, the practice of extending one’s inhales, holds, and exhales. This practice has been shown to calm the autonomic nervous system and reduce anxiety states. Ommie supports the practice by mechanically expanding and contracting in the cadence of deep breathing while a user places their hands on the robot. Early usability testing with the robot shows a quantitatively significant reduction in anxiety state measures after use, as well as high rankings from users on the robot’s calming, approachable, and engaging qualities. Users additionally report Ommie’s haptic and audio interactions as providing a focusing effect, leading to faster calming than other methods they have used in the past. They also describe a companionship element to using Ommie while deep breathing, reminiscent of the motivational effect of meditating in groups or with another person. 

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Publications Featuring Ommie:

A. Chun, E. Mamantov, U. Stahl, B. Scassellati, and S. Leeds (2025). Breathe Easy: Harnessing Robots for Stress Reduction During Pediatric Oral Challenges. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Volume 155, Issue 2. [HTML]

• Abstract: Allergy procedures can have psychosocial and psychological implications on patients and caregivers, including increased anxiety. Pediatric patients appear to have increased comfort and sociability with robots during medical treatment. This pilot study investigated the novel application and use of a robot for deep breathing during support in the setting of oral allergy challenges. An Ommie robot that supports deep breathing practice for anxiety and stress was used. It was available to pediatric patients undergoing outpatient oral challenges in an academic referral hospital. Patients interacted with the robot on average 4.4 times, while caregivers interacted on average 1.3 times. A majority (80%) of patient interactions were completed, and patients over the age of 4 completed breathing cycles for all interactions. A majority (80%) of caregivers believed the robot had a positive impact on their child’s experience and wanted it as an option for future allergy procedures.

K. Matheus, M. Vázquez, and B. Scassellati (2024). Ommie: The Design and Development of a Social Robot for Anxiety Reduction. J. Hum.-Robot Interact. Just Accepted (December 2024). [HTML]

• Abstract: This article discusses the design, development, and evaluation of Ommie, a novel socially assistive robot that supports deep breathing practices for the purposes of anxiety reduction. Research has shown that practicing deep breathing (breathing while extending one’s inhales, holds, and exhales) has a strong capacity to calm the autonomic nervous system and reduce anxiety. The robot’s primary function is to guide users through a series of deep breaths by way of haptic interactions and audio cues. We utilized a user-centered design approach and present our design methodology in addition to core decisions across robot morphology, tactility, and interactivity. As reported in prior work, the final robot prototype was tested with a two-cohort usability study (n = 43) at a local university wellness center, including participants with anxiety and those with varying levels of experience with deep breathing. Interacting with Ommie resulted in a significant reduction in STAI-6 anxiety measures across all participants, who also found the robot intuitive, approachable, and engaging. Participants also reported feelings of focus and companionship when using the robot, often elicited by the haptic interaction. This article describes how our design process and design goals contributed to these results showing Ommie’s capacity for supporting those with anxiety. Our work also serves as an example of how researchers can design robots for behavioral practices for mental health. 

K. Matheus, E. Mamantov, M. Vázquez, B. Scassellati (2023). Deep Breathing Phase Classification with a Social Robot for Mental Health. In International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI ’23), October 9–13, 2023, Paris, France. ACM. New York, NY, USA, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3577190.3614173 [HTML][PDF]

• Abstract: Social robots are in a unique position to aid mental health by supporting engagement with behavioral interventions. One such behavioral intervention is the practice of deep breathing, which has been shown to physiologically reduce symptoms of anxiety. Multiple robots have been recently developed that support deep breathing, but none yet implement a method to detect how accurately an individual is performing the practice. Detecting breathing phases (i.e., inhaling, breath holding, or exhaling) is a challenge with these robots since often the robot is being manipulated or moved by the user, or the robot itself is moving to generate haptic feedback. Accordingly, we first present OMMDB: a novel, multimodal, public dataset made up of individuals performing deep breathing with an Ommie robot in multiple conditions of robot ego-motion. The dataset includes RGB video, inertial sensor data, and motor encoder data, as well as ground truth breathing data from a respiration belt. Our second contribution features experimental results with a convolutional long-short term memory neural network trained using OMMDB. These results show the system’s ability to be applied to the domain of deep breathing and generalize between individual users. We additionally show that our model is able to generalize across multiple types of robot ego-motion, reducing the need to train individual models for varying human-robot interaction conditions.

Kayla Matheus, Marynel Vázquez, Brian Scassellati (2022). A Social Robot for Anxiety Reduction via Deep Breathing. In the 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), Naples, Italy. ***BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD [PDF]

• Abstract: In this paper, we introduce Ommie, a novel robot that supports deep breathing practices for the purposes of anxiety reduction. The robot’s primary function is to guide users through a series of extended inhales, exhales, and holds by way of haptic interactions and audio cues. We present core design decisions during development, such as robot morphology and tactility, as well as the results of a usability study in collaboration with a local wellness center. Interacting with Ommie resulted in a significant reduction in STAI-6 anxiety measures, and participants found the robot intuitive, approachable, and engaging. Participants also reported feelings of focus and companionship when using the robot, often elicited by the haptic interaction. These results show promise in the robot’s capacity for supporting mental health.