Designing a Multimodal Robot Pet for Older Adults by Young Adults

Abstract

Social robots that promote mental well-being have been developed for healthy aging.People's negative attitudes towards such robots, both young and old, currently affect their acceptance.Involving young adults in a relatives-designed social robot with sound/voice responses and multimodal interactions that can be presented to an older family member, has not been studied before.We conducted two user studies to design a social robot with young adults for their elderly relatives: identification (n = 20 young adults) and matching (n = 21 young adults) studies illustrated the relatives-design of social robot sound/voice responses for multimodal inputs of touch, gestures, emotions and speech.Our findings revealed that negative attitudes evolve positively following relatives' design methods, fostering a positive elderly-robot interaction and increasing robot acceptance.