Social robots are being increasingly employed in service encounters at hotels. This study explored the possibility that social robots can engage in heartwarming interactions with hotel customers. A collaboration design known as 'Continuous Hospitality with Social Robots' , in which social robots compensate for gaps in hospitality through heartwarming interaction, was evaluated. A field test was conducted in which social robots engaged in heartwarming interaction with customers in a public area of a hotel and then collected customers' impressions of the social robots and overall service via a questionnaire and an interview. The results demonstrate social robots' potential for engaging in heartwarming interactions that enhance overall customer satisfaction through the use of the 'Continuous Hospitality with Social Robots' collaboration design. An exploratory analysis suggests that the perceived impressions of the interaction with social robots are influenced by customer gender and the duration of interactions. Furthermore, the results suggest that social robots could be utilized in other roles at hotels, namely effective advertisement through heartwarming interaction and mental support for employees who do not interact with customers.

No abstract

No abstract

In this paper, we propose the introduction of human-like communication media as a proxy for teachers to support the listening of children in school education. Three case studies are presented on storytime fieldwork for children using our huggable communication medium called Hugvie, through which children are encouraged to concentrate on listening by intimate interaction between children and storytellers. We investigate the effect of Hugvie on children's listening and how they and their teachers react to it through observations and interviews. Our results suggest that Hugvie increased the number of children who concentrated on listening to a story and was welcomed by almost all the children and educators. We also discuss improvement and research issues to introduce huggable communication media into classrooms, potential applications, and their contributions to other education situations through improved listening.

No abstract

There have been several attempts in recent years to develop a remote communication device using sensory modalities other than speech that would induce a user’s positive experience with his/her conversation partner. Specifically, Hugvie is a human-shaped pillow as well as a remote communication device enabling users to combine a hugging experience with telecommunication to improve the quality of remote communication. The present research is based on the hypothesis that using Hugvie maintains users’ level of trust toward their conversation partners in situations prone to suspicion. The level of trust felt toward other remote game players was compared between participants using Hugvie and those using a basic communication device while playing a modified version of Werewolf, a conversation-based game, designed to evaluate trust. Although there are always winners and losers in the regular version of Werewolf, the rules were modified to generate a possible scenario in which no enemy was present among the players and all players would win if they trusted each other. We examined the effect of using Hugvie while playing Werewolf on players’ level of trust toward each other and our results demonstrated that in those using Hugvie, the level of trust toward other players was maintained.

No abstract

No abstract