Conversational Agents for Elderly Interaction

Interacting with chatbots later in life: A technology acceptance perspective in COVID-19 pandemic situation

“…In the case of Romania, the average age is already 42 years old, and the most numerous age-range is 50–54 years old ( Dan, 2022 ). Furthermore, it is estimated that by 2050, 60% of the population will be over 65 years old ( Coman, 2021 ) and, thus, loneliness and isolation are predicted to deepen ( Da Paixão Pinto et al, 2021 ). This reality is believed to increase both the economic and social pressure, as there is a rise in public health expenditure ( Chen and Schulz, 2016 ; Fang and Chang, 2016 ; Segercrantz and Forss, 2019 ), a permanent need for improved healthcare assistance and assistive living, and a scarce of providers ( Hofmann, 2013 ; Bassi et al, 2021 ).…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of studies that focus on the general use of chatbots by aging population, without particularly emphasizing the healthcare or assistive domains. One of the newest paper in this respect is a systematic literature review written by Da Paixão Pinto et al (2021) in which authors are interested in the engagement strategies of the chatbots, in their computational environments, in the input data format accepted, in the different types of personalization offered, and in the evaluation techniques for conversational agents. Being based on a systematic analysis of 53 papers, the main results of the study emphasize that personalization, context adaptation, a speech type input, and an intuitive system are at the core of an increased engagement and interaction with chatbots ( Da Paixão Pinto et al, 2021 ).…”

“…Technology is undoubtedly perceived as being the solution for improving healthcare. Scholars that develop chatbots talk about the need of designing empathetic virtual companions to alleviate isolation and loneliness ( Da Paixão Pinto et al, 2021 ) and to fulfill the emotional needs of the aging adults and to increase likeability and trustworthiness towards machines ( Yang et al, 2015 ). As the main motivation to use chatbot is productivity, together with entertainment and socialization, chatbots should be equally built as a tool, a toy, and a friend ( Brandtzaeg and Følstad, 2017 ).…”

“…Furthermore, while users might have limited knowledge on chatbots and might consider them as inferior and unworthy entities to communicated with, the feeling of discomfort can lead to the refusal of interaction ( Ivanov and Webster, 2017 ). When it comes to elderly, chatbots are associated with privacy issues, with loss of autonomy, with technical fears, or with lack of usefulness that can increase their resistance and avoidance ( Da Paixão Pinto et al, 2021 ). Thus, although useful for organizations, there are many variables that can deter a good communication flow between chatbots and users.…”

Assisting Personalized Healthcare of Elderly People: Developing a Rule-Based Virtual Caregiver System Using Mobile Chatbot

“…Studies of situation recognition include in-home fine-grained scenes (i.e., called context ) recognition [ 10 , 11 , 12 ]), nonintrusive quality characterization of postural changes [ 13 ], and user-defined indoor location sensing [ 14 ]. As for care nursing intervention, it is common to use physical care robots [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ], chatbots [ 19 , 20 , 21 ], and virtual agents [ 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 ]. The core point of these studies is to encourage dialogue-based interaction between machines and elderly people.…”