Older Adults’ Perception of the Furhat Robot

Abstract

With more robots entering social environments, such as care homes for older adults, it is increasingly important to understand the target user groups’ perception of different robot platforms that are introduced into their immediate surroundings. To add to existing research on older adults’ attitudes toward robots after meeting a robot, and social acceptance toward certain robots, we conducted a short-term interaction study with the Furhat robot. Furhat, a blended embodiment of a physical robot head with a virtual (back-projected) face, is being marketed as one of the most social robots with high human-likeness. However, this study’s results indicates that older adults do not perceive Furhat as anthropomorphic or sentient, and they especially reported a negative attitude toward robots with emotions after meeting Furhat. Despite these scores, all participants were engaged in the interaction with the robot. However, our results differ from previous studies by indicating that older adults have relatively low social acceptance for Furhat and a relatively negative attitude toward robots after meeting Furhat.