An experiment for motivating elderly people with robot guided interaction

Abstract

It is important for elderly people to be involved in local community to reduce the risk of being isolated. The authors are building a framework for encouraging elderly people to participate in more activities by providing local news that may be interesting. Nowadays, there is a lot of information on the Internet; however, few elderly people can obtain the benefits of this information. The Internet is used less by elderly people. It has been reported that one reason for this is diminishing cognitive performance. It is not easy for elderly people to learn a new mental model for a new IT system. Thus, the authors propose a robot-guided interaction framework for elderly people. Once the user initiates an interaction, a communication robot initiates the following interaction sequences. The user can simply follow and respond to the guiding robot, and is not required to learn any operational sequence or mental model. An experiment on such guiding robots was performed with ten elderly subjects, and investigated as to how long elderly people can use the system. As a result of a 12-day experiment, all subjects kept using the system almost every day until the end of the experiment period. According to this result, we can conclude that the robot-guided interaction framework is effective for elderly people. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.