From Fidgeting to Focused: Developing Robot-Enhanced Social-Emotional Therapy (RESET) for School De-Escalation Rooms

Rebecca Ramnauth, Drazen Brscic, Brian Scassellati

Abstract: Many schools have built de-escalation and sensory rooms to support students who experience heightened emotional states, sensory overload, or difficulty self-regulating in traditional classroom settings. Yet, effective implementation remains challenging due to diverse student needs and resource constraints. Hence, we developed RESET (Robot-Enhanced Social-Emotional Therapy), a robot for facilitating students’ self-regulation in their school’s existing de-escalation space. We present our co-design process, iterative development, and final system components. Following a fully autonomous, month-long deployment in an elementary school, we assessed the robot’s usability and impacts. Results indicate RESET integrated well into the school environment, promoting more efficient deescalation, smoother transitions back to classroom learning, and lasting impacts beyond its deployment period.

External IDs:dblp:conf/ro-man/RamnauthBS25