Does the User's Evaluation of a Socially Assistive Robot Change Based on Presence and Companionship Type?

Abstract

A lack of motivation is the most common obstacle for physical activity. Socially Assistive Robots (SAR) can be used to motivate people to workout regularly. However, the embodiment and companionship type can influence user's engagement. We investigated the effects of embodiment (co-present vs. remote-located) and companionship (instructor vs. companion) in a video Human-Robot Interaction (vHRI) study (n=90).

Dances with Social Robots: A Pilot Study at Long-Term Care

“…Our pilot study was conducted during the robot design cycle and is consistent with other similar preliminary HRI studies that also did not have bidirectional interactions or incorporate user actions, e.g., [12,35,64,65]. In our future long-term study, which will be informed from these results, our robots will autonomously recognize and classify the users' affect in order to select the appropriate music and robot dance movements to promote user engagement and the positive affect during dancing.…”

A Meta-Analysis on Remote HRI and In-Person HRI: What Is a Socially Assistive Robot to Do?

“…An advantage of remote HRI is its potential to scale up interactions and enable several users in their own home environments to interact with a single robot remotely, whether at the same time or consecutively and as remote groups. The studies presented herein have all used either a projector [ 33 , 48 ] or a monitor [ 34 , 35 , 36 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 54 , 55 ] as visualization tools to present the remote robot. With the popularity of virtual reality (VR) and its potential use in HRI [ 76 ], the possibility of integrating VR for remote HRI systems could also be explored to emerge the user in the same environment as robots [ 77 ].…”

“…In [ 35 ], under both in-person and remote conditions, 90 adult participants were guided by the NAO robot to perform physical exercise by following the body movements of the robot. The robot was displayed on a screen in the remote condition.…”

“…The first study comparing in-person and remote HRI was conducted in 2004 where participants responded to requests from a humanoid robot for a dessert-serving task and a teaching task, and no significant difference was found between in-person and remote HRI [ 32 ]. More recent studies have shown that, through both types of HRI, people can successfully achieve similar performances [ 33 , 34 ] and have comparable perceptions towards these robots [ 35 , 36 ]. Remote HRI can provide several benefits to in-person HRI: (1) it can minimize the presence of other individuals whether they are experimenters or care staff that need to set up the robots for interactions, and (2) it also allows for the potential scaling-up of robot use as the same robot can be remotely used by different people and across diverse settings from private homes to long-term care homes.…”

“…Compared to remote human–human interaction (HHI), the use of remote HRI can potentially help to alleviate staff shortages [ 37 , 38 , 39 ] and high healthcare costs [ 40 , 41 , 42 ], as well as caregiver burnout and workload [ 43 , 44 , 45 ] by providing needed interventions [ 26 , 27 ], monitoring [ 46 ], and disease management [ 47 ], especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing in-person and remote comparison studies have investigated the feasibility of these types of HRI on individual scenarios and tasks, e.g., [ 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 46 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 ]. However, no consensus on the specific differences between in-person HRI and remote HRI have been determined, as contradictory results have been reported.…”