Kayla Matheus, third year Yale PhD student, was awarded the Best Student Paper award at the 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2022). The conference took place in Naples, Italy on August 29-September 2, 2022.

Kayla’s paper is entitled “A Social Robot for Anxiety Reduction via Deep Breathing”. The paper presents Ommie, a novel robot that supports deep breathing practices for the purposes of anxiety reduction. The full paper can be accessed here.

Congrats, Kayla! Thanks also to everybody who helped with the robot’s design process, like the early testers of Ommie.