Psychological implications of domestic assistive technology for the elderly

The ROBOCARE Domestic Environment (RDE) is the result of a three-year project aimed at developing cognitive support technology for elderly people. Specifically, the domestic environment is equipped with sensors, intelligent software components and devices which cooperate to provide cognitive support to the assisted person. The ROBOCARE interaction capabilities have been concentrated in a robotic mediator who acts as the main communication channel between the users and the intelligent domestic environment. This paper presents an evaluation of elderly people\u27s perception of assistive robots and smart domotic environments. Results show how the acceptability of robotic devices in home settino does not depend only on the practical benefits they can provide, but also on complex relationships between the cognitive, affective and emotional components of people\u27s images of robot. Specially, we analyzes a number of evaluation criteria related to the robot\u27s aspect, the way in which it communicates with the user, and the perceived usefulness of its support services. Among these criteria, the paper proposes and reports an evaluation of how perceived frailty, with reference to both health in general and fear of cognitive weakening, more specifically, can influence the evaluation of a potential aid in everyday life, namely the robotic assistant. The paper also provides a discussion which can be useful for the design of future assistive agents and socially interactive robotic

Producing Acoustic-Prosodic Entrainment in a Robotic Learning Companion to Build Learner Rapport

abstract: With advances in automatic speech recognition, spoken dialogue systems are assuming increasingly social roles. There is a growing need for these systems to be socially responsive, capable of building rapport with users. In human-human interactions, rapport is critical to patient-doctor communication, conflict resolution, educational interactions, and social engagement. Rapport between people promotes successful collaboration, motivation, and task success. Dialogue systems which can build rapport with their user may produce similar effects, personalizing interactions to create better outcomes. This dissertation focuses on how dialogue systems can build rapport utilizing acoustic-prosodic entrainment. Acoustic-prosodic entrainment occurs when individuals adapt their acoustic-prosodic features of speech, such as tone of voice or loudness, to one another over the course of a conversation. Correlated with liking and task success, a dialogue system which entrains may enhance rapport. Entrainment, however, is very challenging to model. People entrain on different features in many ways and how to design entrainment to build rapport is unclear. The first goal of this dissertation is to explore how acoustic-prosodic entrainment can be modeled to build rapport. Towards this goal, this work presents a series of studies comparing, evaluating, and iterating on the design of entrainment, motivated and informed by human-human dialogue. These models of entrainment are implemented in the dialogue system of a robotic learning companion. Learning companions are educational agents that engage students socially to increase motivation and facilitate learning. As a learning companion’s ability to be socially responsive increases, so do vital learning outcomes. A second goal of this dissertation is to explore the effects of entrainment on concrete outcomes such as learning in interactions with robotic learning companions. This dissertation results in contributions both technical and theoretical. Technical contributions include a robust and modular dialogue system capable of producing prosodic entrainment and other socially-responsive behavior. One of the first systems of its kind, the results demonstrate that an entraining, social learning companion can positively build rapport and increase learning. This dissertation provides support for exploring phenomena like entrainment to enhance factors such as rapport and learning and provides a platform with which to explore these phenomena in future work.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Supporting Interaction in the RoboCare Intelligent Assistive Environment

The ROBOCARE project is aimed at creating an instance of integrated environment with software and robotic agents to actively assist an elderly person at home. In particular the project has synthesized a proactive environment for continuous daily activity monitoring in which an autonomous robot acts as a main interactor with the person. This paper accounts for the combination of features that create interactive capabilities for personalized and mixed-initiative interaction with the assisted person. A project with an intelligent assistant The use of intelligent technology for supporting elderly people at home has been addressed in various research projects in the last years (Pollack et al. 2003; Pineau et al. 2003; Haigh et al. 2003; Pollack 2005)