# "Oh, Sorry, I Think I Interrupted You'': Designing Repair Strategies for Robotic Longitudinal Well-being Coaching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03794 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03794/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jan 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [ERR@HRI 2.0 Challenge: Multimodal Detection of Errors and Failures in Human-Robot Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13468/) (2025)
- [Six Guidelines for Trustworthy, Ethical and Responsible Automation Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02371/) (2025)
- [Who Owns The Robot?: Four Ethical and Socio-technical Questions about Wellbeing Robots in the Real World through Community Engagement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02624/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robotic well-being coaches have been shown to successfully promote people's mental well-being. To provide successful coaching, a robotic coach should have the capability to repair the mistakes it makes. Past investigations of robot mistakes are limited to game or task-based, one-off and in-lab studies. This paper presents a 4-phase design process to design repair strategies for robotic longitudinal well-being coaching with the involvement of real-world stakeholders: 1) designing repair strategies with a professional well-being coach; 2) a longitudinal study with the involvement of experienced users (i.e., who had already interacted with a robotic coach) to investigate the repair strategies defined in (1); 3) a design workshop with users from the study in (2) to gather their perspectives on the robotic coach's repair strategies; 4) discussing the results obtained in (2) and (3) with the mental well-being professional to reflect on how to design repair strategies for robotic coaching. Our results show that users have different expectations for a robotic coach than a human coach, which influences how repair strategies should be designed. We show that different repair strategies (e.g., apologizing, explaining, or repairing empathically) are appropriate in different scenarios, and that preferences for repair strategies change during longitudinal interactions with the robotic coach.