Yueren Zhao

About

Yueren Zhao is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of healthcare robotics, caring science, and geriatric psychiatry, with a focus on improving quality of life for older adults with dementia and schizophrenia. Her most influential work, a qualitative case study on rehabilitation care using the Pepper humanoid robot (50 citations), demonstrates how humanoid robots can facilitate therapeutic interactions in Japan's aging society. Zhao's major contributions include developing frameworks for compassionate communication in healthcare robots, identifying transactive relationship phenomena where robots, patients, and care workers form dynamic triadic interactions, and advancing autonomic nervous system monitoring during robot-led exercises. With over 200 total citations across her publications, she has established foundational concepts in humanoid robot consciousness within caring science and created multimodal emotional data collection methods for schizophrenia patients. Notably, her 2021 work on development issues of healthcare robots (45 citations) critically examines the gap between affective computing progress and the nuanced requirements of compassionate care delivery. Zhao's research uniquely bridges engineering, nursing science, and geriatric psychiatry, offering practical solutions for Japan's healthcare workforce challenges while advancing theoretical understanding of human-robot relationships in clinical settings.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Rehabilitation care with Pepper humanoid robot: A qualitative case study of older patients with schizophrenia and/or dementia in Japan

   50 citations · 2020
2. 2
   Development Issues of Healthcare Robots: Compassionate Communication for Older Adults with Dementia

   45 citations · 2021
3. 3
   Characteristics of a Transactive Phenomenon in Relationships among Older Adults with Dementia, Nurses as Intermediaries, and Communication Robot

   28 citations · 2017
4. 4
   Characteristics of Transactive Relationship Phenomena among Older adults, Care Workers as Intermediaries, and the Pepper Robot with Care Prevention Gymnastics Exercises

   26 citations · 2019
5. 5
   Framing the Development of Humanoid Healthcare Robots in Caring Science

   17 citations · 2019
6. 6
   Autonomic nervous activity of patient with schizophrenia during Pepper CPGE-led upper limb range of motion exercises

   14 citations · 2020
7. 7
   Discovering Humanoid Robot Consciousness Within Caring Science

   9 citations · 2019
8. 8
   Characteristics of interactive communication between Pepper robot, patients with schizophrenia, and healthy persons

   7 citations · 2022
9. 9
   Comparison of Subjective Facial Emotion Recognition and “Facial Emotion Recognition Based on Multi-Task Cascaded Convolutional Network Face Detection” between Patients with Schizophrenia and Healthy Participants

   4 citations · 2022
10. 10
    Investigation of Methods to Create Future Multimodal Emotional Data for Robot Interactions in Patients with Schizophrenia: A Case Study

    2 citations · 2022

Key Collaborators

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