Human Robot Engagement and Acceptability in Residential Aged Care

ABSTRACT

People with dementia often suffer the limitation in their ability to communicate and express themselves clearly, consequently spend most of their time alone, and are not engaged in social activity as before. The prolonged lack of engagement has contributed to a variety of negative health effects. The research on engagement and acceptability of people with dementia using assistive technology such as social robots can be useful to provide potential solutions and sustainability. Thus, this article focuses on the service design and the effectiveness of the engagement and acceptability while interacting with a social robot named Matilda being trialed from 2010 until 2013 with 115 participants in Australian residential aged care facilities. Combining the most updated engagement assessment method and the robot acceptance model as the methodology, the findings of this study indicate there is a statistically significant improvement in emotional, visual, and behavioral engagement of older people with social robots over the years. The post-trial survey has also verified their acceptance in the interaction with social robots.

Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to Canossa Home, Blue Cross, and Wyndham Lodge residential care facilities in Australia for facilitating the trials and this research.

Notes

¹ BNC is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources (http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rajiv Khosla

Professor Rajiv Khosla has a multi-disciplinary background in management, engineering, and computer science. His research in three disciplines, namely, information systems, computing, and engineering has been published and reported in journals like Pattern Recognition, Expert Systems with Applications, IEEE Transactions in Engineering Management, IEEE Multimedia, Communications of the ACM, and IEEE Transactions in Power Systems.

Khanh Nguyen

Dr. Khanh Nguyen is currently a researcher at Research Centre for Computers, Communication and Social Innovation, La Trobe University. His research interests include designing social robot services for aged care and autism care, and machine learning, and big data analytics. His work has been published in journals such as Assistive Technologies, Journal of Information Science, World Wide Web Journal, and other high-quality conference proceedings.

Mei-Tai Chu

Dr. Mei-Tai Chu is currently a senior lecturer in the School of Management at La Trobe University. She has also worked as a consultant for several other organizations from 2002 to 2004. She has publications in several referred journals and conference papers in diverse areas such as aged care, service innovation, knowledge management, multi-agent systems, communities of practice, computational intelligence, expert systems, and engineering management.