Closing and closure in human-companion interactions: Analyzing video data from a field study

Abstract

Abstract-A field study with a simple robotic companion is being undertaken in three iterations in the framework of a EU FP7 research project. The interest of this study lies in its design: the robotic interface setup is installed in the subjects' homes and video data are collected during ten days. This gives the rare opportunity to study the development of human-robot relationships over time, and the integration of companion technologies into everyday life. This paper outlines the qualitative inductive approach to data analysis, and discusses selected results. The focus here is on the interactional mechanisms of bringing conversations to an end. The paper distinguishes between "closing" as the conversational mechanism for doing this, and "closure" as the social norm that motivates it. We argue that this distinction is relevant for interaction designers insofar as they have to be aware of the compelling social norms that are invoked by a companion's conversational behaviour.

Conversational Agents for Mental Health and Wellbeing

“…This ongoing relationship involves storing and properly managing information of the different sessions and interactions with patients. Recent projects have also addressed very important aspects in human-machine interaction, such as their social acceptance [23] or the possibility of including additional capabilities such as memory, cognition, emotion recognition or lifelong learning [24,25,26,27,28,29].…”

A multimodal conversational coach for active ageing based on sentient computing and m‐health

“…This continuity forces dialogs to manage extensive and persistent information about the different sessions of the patient. In addition, recent projects have also addressed very important aspects in multimodal human–machine interaction like the social acceptability of verbally assistive systems (Payr, ) or the possibility of including additional capabilities such as memory, cognition, emotion recognition, or learning (Cavazza, De La Cámara, & Turunen, ; Leite et al, ; Young, ), Soprano (Sixsmith et al, ), Humaine (Andre et al, ; Rehrl et al, )).…”

Integrating Constrained Experiments in Long-Term Human–Robot Interaction Using Task- and Scenario-Based Prototyping

“…This necessitates a high degree of pragmatism and creativity when developing appropriate methodologies for examining how prospective users interact with these technologies, and how these interactions may benefit or hinder the user (Dautenhahn 2007). While there have been studies of actual robots acting autonomously in a domestic environment without continuous oversight by experimenters, either the robots employed have had limited movement capabilities, and served mainly as physically embodied conversational agents (not unlike those described in Bickmore and Cassell 2005) as in the KSERA project (Payr 2010), or the robots were market-ready products (Fernaeus et al 2010;Sung et al 2008) or at a late stage in the development cycle (Kidd and Breazeal 2008). Furthermore, due to the cost in time and resources to set up and run the experiments, live interactions with robotic technologies in complex usage scenarios usually involve only a relatively small number of participants Huijnen et al 2011).…”