Objective To review research on social robots to help children in healthcare contexts in order to describe the current state of the literature and explore future directions for research and practice.

Design Scoping review.

Data sources Engineering Village, IEEE Xplore, Medline, PsycINFO and Scopus databases were searched up until 10 July 2017. Only publications written in English were considered. Identified publications were initially screened by title and abstract, and the full texts of remaining publications were then subsequently screened.

Eligibility criteria Publications were included if they were journal articles, conference proceedings or conference proceedings published as monographs that described the conceptualisation, development, testing or evaluation of social robots for use with children with any mental or physical health condition or disability. Publications on autism exclusively, robots for use with children without identified health conditions, physically assistive or mechanical robots, non-physical hardware robots and surgical robots were excluded.

Results Seventy-three publications were included in the review, of which 50 included user studies with a range of samples. Most were feasibility studies with small sample sizes, suggesting that the robots were generally accepted. At least 26 different robots were used, with many of these still in development. The most commonly used robot was NAO. The evidence quality was low, with only one randomised controlled trial and a limited number of experimental designs.

Conclusions Social robots hold significant promise and potential to help children in healthcare contexts, but higher quality research is required with experimental designs and larger sample sizes.