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Creating New Technologies for Companionable Agents to Support Isolated Older Adults

Published: 24 July 2018 Publication History

Abstract

This article reports on the development of capabilities for (on-screen) virtual agents and robots to support isolated older adults in their homes. A real-time architecture was developed to use a virtual agent or a robot interchangeably to interact via dialog and gesture with a human user. Users could interact with either agent on 12 different activities, some of which included on-screen games, and forms to complete. The article reports on a pre-study that guided the choice of interaction activities. A month-long study with 44 adults between the ages of 55 and 91 assessed differences in the use of the robot and virtual agent.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems
ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems  Volume 8, Issue 3
September 2018
235 pages
ISSN:2160-6455
EISSN:2160-6463
DOI:10.1145/3236465
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 24 July 2018
Accepted: 01 March 2018
Revised: 01 February 2018
Received: 01 April 2017
Published in TIIS Volume 8, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. Content Indicators: I.2.m
  2. H.1.2
  3. H.5.2 keywords: virtual agents
  4. I.2.9
  5. engagement
  6. human-agent interaction studies
  7. human-robot interaction
  8. human-robot interaction studies
  9. older adults
  10. real-time dialog systems
  11. robot compantions
  12. situated dialog systems
  13. social isolation
  14. virtual agent companions

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  • (2024)Voice Assistants for Mental Health Services: Designing Dialogues with Homebound Older AdultsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661536(844-858)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Aging with robots: A brief review on eldercare automationInterdisciplinary Nursing Research10.1097/NR9.00000000000000523:1(49-56)Online publication date: Mar-2024
  • (2024)Operational Performance and Subjective Preferences of Elderly Users in Intelligent Interactive Interfaces: A Systematic ReviewInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2024.2352226(1-15)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
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  • (2023)Older adults' perspectives on multimodal interaction with a conversational virtual coachFrontiers in Computer Science10.3389/fcomp.2023.11258955Online publication date: 7-Nov-2023
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