Intimate Touch Conversation through Teleoperated Android: Toward Enhancement of Interpersonal Closeness in Elderly People

Abstract

We propose Intimate Touch Conversation (ITC) as a new remote communication paradigm in which an individual, who is holding a telepresence humanoid, engages in a conversation-over-distance with a remote partner that is tele-operating the humanoid. We investigate the effect of this new communication paradigm on interpersonal closeness in comparison with in-person and video-chat. Our results suggest that ITC significantly enhances the feeling of interpersonal closeness, as opposed to video-chat and in-person. In addition, they show that ITC allows elderly people to find their conversation more interesting. These results imply that feeling of intimate touch that is evoked by the presence of teleoperated android enables elderly users to establish a closer relationship with their conversational partners over distance, thereby reducing their feeling of loneliness. Our findings benefit researchers and engineers in elderly care facilities in search of effective means of establishing a social relation with their elderly users to reduce their feeling of social isolation and loneliness.