Older Adults Living With Social Robots: Promoting Social Connectedness in Long-Term Communities

Abstract

Social robots have been used to investigate human-to-robot engagement-but connection between one person and another is the real key for human emotional wellness. This work explores the role and impact of a social robot in facilitating human-to-human engagement in an assisted-living community. Older adults, in particular, are a population in need of sufficient social connectedness to promote their well-being. While several studies have sought to investigate how social robots can help to improve older adults? quality of life, not many have studied their long-term impact on community-level engagement.