Emotional Support Domestic Robots for Healthy Older Adults: Conversational Prototypes to Help With Loneliness

Abstract

A burgeoning area of HRI explores how robots can be used to assist older adults who are dealing with health issues. However, much of this work focuses on aiding older adults that are living with dementia or other serious health-related problems. In this work, we focus on robots helping otherwise-healthy older adults living with social isolation and loneliness. We created an initial robot behavior design, which leverages techniques from therapy, to provide emotional support through basic conversational ability.

Poster

Download the Emotional Support Domestic Robots for Healthy Older Adults: Conversational Prototypes to Help With Loneliness project poster.

Citation

Annalena Nora Baecker, Denise Y. Geiskkovitch, Adriana Lorena González and James E. Young. 2020. Emotional Support Domestic Robots for Healthy Older Adults: Conversational Prototypes to Help With Loneliness. In Companion Proceedings of 2020 ACM International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI’20), March 23–26, 2020, Cambridge, United Kingdom. ACM, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3371382.3378279