As the field of HRI evolves, it is important to understand how users interact with robots over long periods. This paper reviews the current research on long-term interaction between users and social robots. We describe the main features of these robots and highlight the main findings of the existing long-term studies. We also present a set of directions for future research and discuss some open issues that should be addressed in this field.

Social Robots for Long-Term Interaction: A Survey

Interactions between consumers and humanoid service robots (HSRs; i.e., robots with a human-like morphology such as a face, arms, and legs) will soon be part of routine marketplace experiences. It ...

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Service Robots Rising: How Humanoid Robots Influence Service Experiences and Elicit Compensatory Consumer Responses:

In movies, robots are often extremely humanlike. Although these robots are not yet reality, robots are currently being used in healthcare, education, and business. Robots provide benefits such as relieving loneliness and enabling communication. Engineers are trying to build robots that look and behave like humans and thus need comprehensive knowledge not only of technology but also of human cognition, emotion, and behavior. This need is driving engineers to study human behavior toward other humans and toward robots, leading to greater understanding of how humans think, feel, and behave in these contexts, including our tendencies for mindless social behaviors, anthropomorphism, uncanny feelings toward robots, and the formation of emotional attachments. However, in considering the increased use of robots, many people have concerns about deception, privacy, job loss, safety, and the loss of human relationships. Human–robot interaction is a fascinating field and one in which psychologists have much to contrib...

Interactions With Robots: The Truths We Reveal About Ourselves.

The world’s population is aging, and developed countries are engaged in developing a new aged-care paradigm to reduce spiraling healthcare costs. Assistive technologies like Socially Assistive Robots (SAR) are being considered as enablers to support the process of care giving or keep elderly at home longer. This article reports a mixed-method systematic review of SAR in elderly care and recognizes its impact on elderly well-being, integrating evidence from qualitative and quantitative studies. It follows the principles explained in Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions and classifies interventions, measures, and outcomes of field trials of SAR in elderly care. Eighty-six studies in 37 study groups have been included. The findings imply positive effects of SAR on elderly well-being. Ten significant recommendations are made to help avoid the current limitations of existing research and to improve future research and its applicability. This review revealed that SAR can potentially enhance...

Socially Assistive Robots in Elderly Care: A Mixed-Method Systematic Literature Review

Conversational agents promise conversational interaction but fail to deliver. Efforts often emulate functional rules from human speech, without considering key characteristics that conversation must encapsulate. Given its potential in supporting long-term human-agent relationships, it is paramount that HCI focuses efforts on delivering this promise. We aim to understand what people value in conversation and how this should manifest in agents. Findings from a series of semi-structured interviews show people make a clear dichotomy between social and functional roles of conversation, emphasising the long-term dynamics of bond and trust along with the importance of context and relationship stage in the types of conversations they have. People fundamentally questioned the need for bond and common ground in agent communication, shifting to more utilitarian definitions of conversational qualities. Drawing on these findings we discuss key challenges for conversational agent design, most notably the need to redefine the design parameters for conversational agent interaction.

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What Makes a Good Conversation?: Challenges in Designing Truly Conversational Agents

This paper reports an ethnographic study on the use of a conversational robot. We placed a robot for 3.5 months in an elderly care center. Assuming a real deployment scenario, the robot was managed by a single non-programmer person during the field trial, who teleoperated the robot and updated the contents. The robot was designed to engage in daily greetings and chatting with elderly people. Through the ethnographic approach, we clarified how the elderly people interacted with this conversational robot, how the deployment process adopted to introduce the robot was designed, and how the organization's personnel involved themselves in this deployment.

A conversational robot in an elderly care center: an ethnographic study

This paper, which reports a qualitative study on a social robot in a local shopping mall in Japan, explores how visitors interacted, understood, and accepted it. In the shopping mall where we conducted our study, Robovie, a humanoid robot, has been tested for 3 years. Based on this context of long-term exposure to a social robot, we conducted short-term interviews and observations with the visitors to the mall. We analyzed the obtained qualitative data by a grounded-theory approach and identified four common trends: (1) association of the robot with its location; (2) assigning of future roles to the robot; (3) perceiving it as a form of entertainment for children, i.e., as a mascot; and (4) perception of autonomy is independent of how the robot works. One might expect people to automatically see the robot as a utility, but instead they tended to consider it a suitable mascot.

Alessandra Maria Sabelli

Papers

A conversational robot in an elderly care center: an ethnographic study

Robovie as a Mascot: A Qualitative Study for Long-Term Presence of Robots in a Shopping Mall