  Social robots are starting to become incorporated into daily lives by
assisting in the promotion of physical and mental wellbeing. This paper
investigates the use of social robots for delivering mindfulness sessions. We
created a teleoperated robotic platform that enables an experienced human coach
to conduct the sessions in a virtual manner by replicating upper body and head
pose in real time. The coach is also able to view the world from the robot's
perspective and make a conversation with participants by talking and listening
through the robot. We studied how participants interacted with a teleoperated
robot mindfulness coach over a period of 5 weeks and compared with the
interactions another group of participants had with a human coach. The
mindfulness sessions delivered by both types of coaching invoked positive
responses from the participants for all the sessions. We found that the
participants rated the interactions with human coach consistently high in all
aspects. However, there is a longitudinal change in the ratings for the
interaction with the teleoperated robot for the aspects of motion and
conversation. We also found that the participants' personality traits --
conscientiousness and neuroticism influenced the perceptions of the robot
coach.
