  There is a close connection between health and the quality of one's social
life. Strong social bonds are essential for health and wellbeing, but often
health conditions can detrimentally affect a person's ability to interact with
others. This can become a vicious cycle resulting in further decline in health.
For this reason, the social management of health is an important aspect of
healthcare. We propose that socially assistive robots (SARs) could help people
with health conditions maintain positive social lives by supporting them in
social interactions. This paper makes three contributions, as detailed below.
We develop a framework of social mediation functions that robots could perform,
motivated by the special social needs that people with health conditions have.
In this framework we identify five types of functions that SARs could perform:
a) changing how the person is perceived, b) enhancing the social behavior of
the person, c) modifying the social behavior of others, d) providing structure
for interactions, and e) changing how the person feels. We thematically
organize and review the existing literature on robots supporting human-human
interactions, in both clinical and non-clinical settings, and explain how the
findings and design ideas from these studies can be applied to the functions
identified in the framework. Finally, we point out and discuss challenges in
designing SARs for supporting social interactions, and highlight opportunities
for future robot design and HRI research on the mediator role of robots.
