This study aims to understand if, and how, social robots can promote wellbeing in the elderly. The existing literature suggests that social robots have the potential to improve wellbeing in the elderly, but existing robots focus more on healthcare and healthy behaviour among the elderly. This work describes a new investigation based on focus groups and home studies, in which we produced a set of requirements for social robots that reduce loneliness and improve psychological wellbeing among the elderly. The requirements were validated with the participants of our study. We anticipate that the results of this work will lead to the design of a new social robot more suited to improving wellbeing of the elderly. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.

Investigating the suitability of social robots for the wellbeing of the elderly

Working families: Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

There is an increased interest in using social robots to assist older adults during their daily life activities. As social robots are designed to interact with older users, it becomes relevant to study these interactions under the lens of social cognition. Gaze following, the social ability to infer where other people are looking at, deteriorates with older age. Therefore, the referential gaze from robots might not be an effective social cue to indicate spatial locations to older users. In this study, we explored the performance of older adults, middle-aged adults, and younger controls in a task assisted by the referential gaze of a Pepper robot. We examined age-related differences in task performance, and in self-reported social perception of the robot. Our main findings show that referential gaze from a robot benefited task performance, although the magnitude of this facilitation was lower for older participants. Moreover, perceived anthropomorphism of the robot varied less as a result of its referential gaze in older adults. This research supports that social robots, even if limited in their gazing capabilities, can be effectively perceived as social entities. Additionally, this research suggests that robotic social cues, usually validated with young participants, might be less optimal signs for older adults.The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12369-022-00926-6. 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-022-00926-6

Age-Related Differences in the Perception of Robotic Referential Gaze in Human-Robot Interaction

Robots can direct human attention using their eyes. However, it remains unclear whether it is the gaze or the low-level motion of the head rotation that drives attention. We isolated these components in a non-predictive gaze cueing task with a robot to explore how limited robotic signals orient attention. In each trial, the head of a NAO robot turned towards the left or right. To isolate the direction of rotation from its gaze, NAO was presented frontally and backward along blocks. Participants responded faster to targets on the gazed-at site, even when the eyes of the robot were not visible and the direction of rotation was opposed to that of the frontal condition. Our results showed that low-level motion did not orient attention, but the gaze direction of the robot did. These findings suggest that the robotic gaze is perceived as a social signal, similar to human gaze.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3568294.3580066

Robotic Gaze Drives Attention, Even with No Visible Eyes

The sensibility to deictic gaze declines naturally with age and often results in reduced social perception. Thus, the increasing efforts in developing social robots that assist older adults during daily life tasks need to consider the effects of aging. In this context, as non-verbal cues such as deictic gaze are important in natural communication in human-robot interaction, this paper investigates the performance of older adults, as compared to younger adults, during a controlled, online (visual search) task inspired by daily life activities, while assisted by a social robot. This paper also examines age-related differences in social perception. Our results showed a significant facilitation effect of head movement representing deictic gaze from a Pepper robot on task performance. This facilitation effect was not significantly different between the age groups. However, social perception of the robot was less influenced by its deictic gaze behavior in older adults, as compared to younger adults. This line of research may ultimately help informing the design of adaptive non-verbal cues from social robots for a wide range of end users.

Age-Related Differences in the Perception of Eye-Gaze from a Social Robot

Towards human-based models of behaviour in social robots: Exploring age-related differences in the processing of gaze cues in human-robot interaction

/pdf/towards-human-based-models-of-behaviour-in-social-robots-3wsgipqxmk.pdf

Towards Human-Based Models of Behaviour in Social Robots: Exploring Age-Related Differences in the Processing of Gaze Cues in Human-Robot Interaction.

Rapid development of social robots stimulates active research in human motion modeling, interpretation and prediction, proactive collision avoidance, human-robot interaction and co-habitation in shared spaces. Modern approaches to this end require high quality datasets for training and evaluation. However, the majority of available datasets suffers from either inaccurate tracking data or unnatural, scripted behavior of the tracked people. This paper attempts to fill this gap by providing high quality tracking information from motion capture, eye-gaze trackers and on-board robot sensors in a semantically-rich environment. To induce natural behavior of the recorded participants, we utilise loosely scripted task assignment, which induces the participants navigate through the dynamic laboratory environment in a natural and purposeful way. The motion dataset, presented in this paper, sets a high quality standard, as the realistic and accurate data is enhanced with semantic information, enabling development of new algorithms which rely not only on the tracking information but also on contextual cues of the moving agents, static and dynamic environment.

Lucas Morillo-Mendez

Papers

Age-Related Differences in the Perception of Robotic Referential Gaze in Human-Robot Interaction

Robotic Gaze Drives Attention, Even with No Visible Eyes

Towards Human-Based Models of Behaviour in Social Robots: Exploring Age-Related Differences in the Processing of Gaze Cues in Human-Robot Interaction.

Age-Related Differences in the Perception of Eye-Gaze from a Social Robot

The Magni Human Motion Dataset: Accurate, Complex, Multi-Modal, Natural, Semantically-Rich and Contextualized