Temporal Patterns in Multi-modal Social Interaction between Elderly Users and Service Robot

Social interaction, especially for older people living alone is a challenge currently facing human-robot interaction (HRI). User interfaces to manage service robots in home environments need to be tailored for older people. Multi-modal interfaces providing users with more than one communication option seem promising. There has been little research on user preference towards HRI interfaces; most studies have focused on utility and functionality of the interface. In this paper, we took both objective observations and participants’ opinions into account in studying older users with a robot partner. Our study was under the framework of the EU FP7 Robot-Era Project. The developed dual-modal robot interface offered older users options of speech or touch screen to perform tasks. Fifteen people aged from 70 to 89 years old, participated. We analyzed the spontaneous actions of the participants, including their attentional activities (eye contacts) and conversational activities, the temporal characteristics (timestamps, duration of events, event transitions) of these social behaviours, as well as questionnaires. This combination of data distinguishes it from other studies that focused on questionnaire ratings only. There were three main findings. First, the design of the Robot-Era interface was very acceptable for older users. Secondly, most older people used both speech and tablet to perform the food delivery service, with no difference in their preferences towards either. Thirdly, these older people had frequent and long-duration eye contact with the robot during their conversations, showing patience when expecting the robot to respond. They enjoyed the service. Overall, social engagement with the robot demonstrated by older people was no different from what might be expected towards a human partner. This study is an early attempt to reveal the social connections between human beings and a personal robot in real life. Our observations and findings should inspire new insights in HRI research and eventually contribute to next-generation intelligent robot developmen

Utilization of Non-verbal Behaviour and Social Gaze in Classroom Human-Robot Interaction Communications

This abstract explores classroom Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios with an emphasis on the adaptation of human-inspired social gaze models in robot cognitive architecture to facilitate a more seamless social interaction. First, we detail the HRI scenarios explored by us in our studies followed by a description of the social gaze model utilized for our research. We highlight the advantages of utilizing such an attentional model in classroom HRI scenarios. We also detail the intended goals of our upcoming study involving this social gaze model.Comment: In WTF Workshop Proceedings (arXiv:2401.04108) held in conjunction with the ACM conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI), 19 - 21/07 2023, in Eindhoven, The Netherland

User-centered design of a dynamic-autonomy remote interaction concept for manipulation-capable robots to assist elderly people in the home

In this article, we describe the development of a human-robot interaction concept for service robots to assist elderly people in the home with physical tasks. Our approach is based on the insight that robots are not yet able to handle all tasks autonomously with sufficient reliability in the complex and heterogeneous environments of private homes. We therefore employ remote human operators to assist on tasks a robot cannot handle completely autonomously. Our development methodology was user-centric and iterative, with six user studies carried out at various stages involving a total of 241 participants. The concept is under implementation on the Care-O-bot 3 robotic platform. The main contributions of this article are (1) the results of a survey in form of a ranking of the demands of elderly people and informal caregivers for a range of 25 robot services, (2) the results of an ethnography investigating the suitability of emergency teleassistance and telemedical centers for incorporating robotic teleassistance, and (3) a user-validated human-robot interaction concept with three user roles and corresponding three user interfaces designed as a solution to the problem of engineering reliable service robots for home environments

Social robots for older users: a possibility to support assessment and social interventions

In the last decades, various researches in the field of robotics have created numerous opportunities for innovative support of the older population. The goal of this work was to review and highlight how social robots can help the daily life of older people, and be useful also as assessment tools. We will underline the aspects of usability and acceptability of robotic supports in the psychosocial work with older persons. The actual usability of the system influences the perception of the ease of use only when the user has no or low experience, while expert users’ perception is related to their attitude towards the robot. This finding should be more deeply analysed because it may have a strong influence on the design of future interfaces for elderly-robot interaction. Robots can play an important role to tackle the societal challenge of the growing older population. The authors report some recent studies with older users, where it was demonstrated that the acceptability of robotics during daily life activities, and also in cognitive evaluation, could be supported by social robot

Challenges in Collaborative HRI for Remote Robot Teams

Collaboration between human supervisors and remote teams of robots is highly challenging, particularly in high-stakes, distant, hazardous locations, such as off-shore energy platforms. In order for these teams of robots to truly be beneficial, they need to be trusted to operate autonomously, performing tasks such as inspection and emergency response, thus reducing the number of personnel placed in harm's way. As remote robots are generally trusted less than robots in close-proximity, we present a solution to instil trust in the operator through a `mediator robot' that can exhibit social skills, alongside sophisticated visualisation techniques. In this position paper, we present general challenges and then take a closer look at one challenge in particular, discussing an initial study, which investigates the relationship between the level of control the supervisor hands over to the mediator robot and how this affects their trust. We show that the supervisor is more likely to have higher trust overall if their initial experience involves handing over control of the emergency situation to the robotic assistant. We discuss this result, here, as well as other challenges and interaction techniques for human-robot collaboration.Comment: 9 pages. Peer reviewed position paper accepted in the CHI 2019 Workshop: The Challenges of Working on Social Robots that Collaborate with People (SIRCHI2019), ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2019, Glasgow, U