Social Assistive Robotics is increasingly being used in care settings to provide psychosocial support and interventions for the elderly with cognitive impairments. Most of these social robots have provided timely stimuli to the elderly at home and in care centres, including keeping them active and boosting their mood. However, previous investigations have registered shortcomings in these robots, particularly in their ability to satisfy an essential human need: the need for companionship. Reports show that the elderly tend to lose interests in these social robots after the initial excitement as the novelty wears out and the monotonous familiarity becomes all too familiar. This paper presents our research facilitating conversations between a social humanoid robot, Nadine, and cognitively impaired elderly at a nursing home. We analysed the effectiveness of human–humanoid interactions between our robot and 14 elderly over 29 sessions. We used both objective tools (based on computer vision methods) and subjective tools (based on observational scales) to evaluate the recorded videos. Our findings showed that our subjects engaged positively with Nadine, suggesting that their interaction with the robot could improve their well-being by compensating for some of their emotional, cognitive, and psychosocial deficiencies. We detected emotions associated with cognitively impaired elderly during these interactions. This study could help understand the expectations of the elderly and the current limitations of Social Assistive Robots. Our research is aligned with all the ethical recommendations by the NTU Institutional Review Board.
There are considerable advancements in medical health care in recent years, resulting in rising older population. As the workforce for such a population is not keeping pace, there is an urgent need to address this problem. Having robots to stimulating recreational activities for older adults can reduce the workload for caretakers and give them time to address the emotional needs of the elderly. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the humanoid social robot Nadine as an activity host for the elderly. This study aims to analyse if the elderly feels comfortable and enjoy playing game/activity with the humanoid robot Nadine. We propose to evaluate this by placing Nadine humanoid social robot in a nursing home as a caretaker where she hosts bingo game. We record sessions with and without Nadine to understand the difference and acceptance of these two scenarios. We use computer vision methods to analyse the activities of the elderly to detect emotions and their involvement in the game. We envision that such humanoid robots will make recreational activities more readily available for the elderly. Our results present positive enforcement during recreational activity, Bingo, in the presence of Nadine.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.