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606 11 FEBRUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6581 science.org SCIENCE
If patients can use video to bond with
remote doctors, Ahumada thought, perhaps
children at home could forge relationships
with classmates and teachers the same way.
“I wanted to know,” she says, “if it was good
enough for physicians, was it good enough
for kids? Do we have the technology to com-
pletely transform the daily experience of
these children?”
Ahumada wanted to study the idea in
graduate school, but she struggled to find an
adviser. Eventually, she connected with Mark
Warschauer at UC Irvine, who investigates
how digital technologies can enable learning
and social inclusion. His team wasn’t study-
ing remote access for children, he told her—
no one he knew of was—but he offered her a
spot in his lab.
Colleagues were skeptical, though. One
likened research on telepresence robots to
“studying TV carts.” Another told her the
work would have no impact because “so few”
students have illnesses that require them to
stay home. Even Warschauer didn’t seem
fully convinced, she says, until he saw a Veri-
zon ad from the 2013 Super Bowl, which fea-
tured a child maneuvering a robot through
school from a hospital bed. “Mark had
never seen my idea conceptualized before,”
Ahumada says. “We were so excited—we were
like, ‘It’s a thing!’”
The device in the ad was manufactured by
VGo, a small company that had already be-
gun to sell robots to schools for ill students
but hadn’t done research to discover how well
the devices met their aims. (The company has
since been acquired by Vecna Technologies.)
Ahumada contacted VGo, which connected
her with a school district in Texas that had
just purchased several robots. The program
had started with a girl in elementary school
who was using a robot while undergoing can-
cer treatment. Her classmates were so grate-
ful their friend could remain among them
during her illness that they raised more than
$1000 to help buy another robot for other ill
children to use.
Ahumada decided to base her first case
study there, using interviews to probe how
ill children and their community used the
devices. The logistics were complicated.
Because the robot captures the classroom
on video, families of every student had to
consent to its presence. Recruiting robot
users was another challenge. Like most
families with a seriously ill child, the ones
in this district “were just trying to survive,”
Warschauer says. “They weren’t thinking
about participating in research projects.” But
by the end of 2013, Ahumada had completed
the study, interviewing five sick students
from second to ninth grade about their ex-
periences with the VGo robots, as well as five
parents, 10 teachers, 35 classmates, and six
school administrators.
The ill students all told Ahumada aboutrelief the robot brought from social isolation.
One child’s mother said she didn’t realize her
son was depressed until she saw him blossom
with the robot, spending much more time
alert and engaged with school. The study
also revealed classmates and teachers quickly
came to treat the robot not as a moving hunk
of plastic and metal, but as the student it rep-
resented. Children and adults referred to it
by the student’s name, and many classmates
went out of their way to help when the robot
got stuck. “My research kind of gives me hope
for humanity,” Ahumada says. “The majority
of kids are so thoughtful.”
Not every experience was positive. A ninth
grade girl decided to return the robot be-
cause of the unwanted attention it brought—
classmates teasingly called her a “vacuum
cleaner,” for example. And a fifth grade boy
was bullied by a classmate who kept smear-
ing the robot’s lens with ketchup.M ATA R I ́C, TOO, has explored how the tech-
nology works in schools, using robots made
by a company called Ohmnilabs. She and
her colleagues first had design experts op-
erate a classroom robot remotely, as a child
would, to identify technical features that
would help children and teachers use them
more effectively. These included a signal like
raising one’s hand to get a teacher’s atten-
tion and a camera that swivels to look at a
classmate. A study that gave robots to four PHOTO: XAVIER MASCAREÑASVeronica Ahumada hopes her telepresence research will help children avoid the isolation she felt as a girl, when illness kept her home from school.