Exploring the Role of Empathy in Designing Social Robots for Elderly People
Pages 120 - 125
Abstract
Social robots are emerging as a valuable tool in promoting holistic person-centered care and well-being among seniors. One aspect that often affects seniors’ lives is the feeling of loneliness and social isolation. In the context of the SISTER project, we aim to investigate the acceptance of a personal social robot as a tool to mitigate these aspects. Empathy plays an important role in establishing a human-robot emotional and social connection. As a first phase of our project, we investigate empathy’s impact on human-robot interaction when a social robot serves as a senior companion. For this purpose, two robot dialog versions were developed: a non-empathic version, acting as a conversational interface without considering users’ emotional states, and an empathic version in which emotion recognition is used to understand and respond empathically to the users’ emotional state. Thirty older adults were involved in the study, revealing that, as far as senior-robot interaction is concerned, the empathic condition resulted in a more usable and positive experience showing that this robot’s capability should be considered in future developments for personalizing the interaction.
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Published In
June 2024
662 pages
ISBN:9798400704666
DOI:10.1145/3631700
- General Chairs:
- Ludovico Boratto,
- Cristina Gena,
- Mirko Marras,
- Program Chairs:
- Panagiotis Germanakos,
- Elvira Popescus
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Published: 28 June 2024
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UMAP '24: 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization
July 1 - 4, 2024
Cagliari, Italy
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