Basic Study of Wall-Projected Humanitude Agent for Pre-care Multimodal Interaction

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an agent system that is projected on a wall and that provides a pre-care multimodal interaction with a user by adopting Humanitude method. It was expected that not only human’s care but also robot’s care using Humanitude smoothen the introductory interaction before the dementia elderly cares. We selected the two steps of Humanitude, “look into their eyes” and “touch them”. The agent first moves into the user’s field of view corresponding to her/his facing direction to make eye contact, and next approaches to the user (to the virtual camera), and touches on the user by an air cannon. We verified whether the proposed agent system brings about familiarity, reliability, presence, and naturalness by subjective evaluation and found the effectiveness of the movement, approachability action, and touch of the agent.