Acceptance and Attitudes Toward a Human-like Socially Assistive Robot by Older Adults

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that cognitive and social interventions are crucial to the overall health of older adults including their psychological, cognitive, and physical well-being. However, due to the rapidly growing elderly population of the world, the resources and people to provide these interventions is lacking. Our work focuses on the use of social robotic technologies to provide person-centered cognitive interventions. In this article, we investigate the acceptance and attitudes of older adults toward the human-like expressive socially assistive robot Brian 2.1 in order to determine if the robot's human-like assistive and social characteristics would promote the use of the robot as a cognitive and social interaction tool to aid with activities of daily living. The results of a robot acceptance questionnaire administered during a robot demonstration session with a group of 46 elderly adults showed that the majority of the individuals had positive attitudes toward the socially assistive robot and its intended applications.

Immersive Virtual Environment as a Promising Tool for the Elderly-Friendly Assistive Robot Design

“…In addition to the physical living environment, many studies have been empirically investigated the importance of learning environment during the adoption of new technology for elderly [19][20][21]. For example, if we provide hands-on experience with teaching and guide support to elderly, it will increase long-term viability and acceptance.…”

Acceptance of Robot-Era system: results of robotic services in smart environments with older adults (Preprint)

“…For this reason, in recent years, many studies have been conducted to evaluate the acceptance of robots by elderly users [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30].…”

“…[20,21], or a vieo clip showing the robot's capabilities [22,25], or live demonstration performed by a researcher [23,24]. Second, some studies involved a small number of participants [26,27,30,31], and those studies conducted with many older adults had some limitations because users attended a single live demonstration without direct interaction with a robot [23]. In some studies, the experiment was conducted with a "Wizard of Oz" methodology (experiment in which subjects interact with a system that they believe to be autonomous, but which is controlled by a hidden person) [28], or the robot was tele-operated by the user [32].…”

“…In other studies, a robot was presented to elderly people, but they did not have the opportunity to directly interact with it and their feedback was obtained after viewing a video clip or a live demonstration showing the potentialities of a robot [22][23][24][25].…”

Application of Interpretive Structural Modeling on Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication Models Between Learning Companion Humanoids and Elderly Humans

“…One of the solutions is by using artificial intelligence or robots to aid humans in caring for the elderly (Morin et al, 2012). Quite a number of research projects pertaining to robots cater to the physical aspects of what a robot can do (Louie et al, 2014;Montemerlo et al, 2002;Fischinger et al, 2016), a handful cater to the needs of the elderly (Torta et al, 2014;Mitzner et al, 2014;Harmo et al,…”