Effects of the Level of Interactivity of a Social Robot and the Response of the Augmented Reality Display in Contextual Interactions of People with Dementia.

Yuan Feng,G W Matthias Rauterberg,Jun Hu,Emilia I Barakova,Suihuai Yu

doi:10.3390/s20133771

Yuan Feng, G W Matthias Rauterberg + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s20133771

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Abstract

The well-being of people with dementia (PWD) living in long-term care facilities is hindered due to disengagement and social isolation. Animal-like social robots are increasingly used in dementia care as they can provide companionship and engage PWD in meaningful activities. While most previous human–robot interaction (HRI) research studied engagement independent from the context, recent findings indicate that the context of HRI sessions has an impact on user engagement. This study aims to explore the effects of contextual interactions between PWD and a social robot embedded in the augmented responsive environment. Three experimental conditions were compared: reactive context-enhanced robot interaction; dynamic context-enhanced interaction with a static robot; a control condition with only the dynamic context presented. Effectiveness evaluations were performed with 16 participants using four observational rating scales on observed engagement, affective states, and apathy related behaviors. Findings suggested that the higher level of interactivity of a social robot and the interactive contextualized feedback helped capture and maintain users’ attention during engagement; however, it did not significantly improve their positive affective states. Additionally, the presence of either a static or a proactive robot reduced apathy-related behaviors by facilitating purposeful activities, thus, motivating behavioral engagement.

Highlights

People with dementia (PWD) in long-term care (LTC) facilities may benefit from appropriate technological solutions that target the improvement of current disengaged lifestyles [1], by motivating intrinsic interests and engaging in meaningful activities [2,3]
The aforementioned literature, demonstrating promising evidence on animal-like social robots’ roles in enhancing the engagement of PWD, the nature and extent of the evidence supporting the use of social robots are unclear, and there is no consensus in the documented results that confirms that a robot with relatively higher interactivity performs significantly better than a plush toy on user engagement or the affective states of PWD
Four different rating scales demonstrated a number of consistent results: (1) the significant results discovered between the interaction with C1 and CC suggested that the contextual interactions, including

Summary

Introduction

People with dementia (PWD) in long-term care (LTC) facilities may benefit from appropriate technological solutions that target the improvement of current disengaged lifestyles [1], by motivating intrinsic interests and engaging in meaningful activities [2,3]. Animal-like social robots are one major area that is gradually gaining attention in dementia care Such robotic pets (such as PARO [4,5,6], a robotic baby seal, AIBO [7], a robotic dog, NeCoRo [8], a robotic cat, Huggable [9] and CuDDler [10], robotic teddy bears, and Pleo [11,12,13], a robotic dinosaur) are designed to provide companionship and social support, motivate communications, help regulate anxiety, depression, and agitation, and they demonstrate similar positive effects as animal-assisted therapy for improving quality of life [14,15].

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