The Role of Personality Factors and Empathy in the Acceptance and Performance of a Social Robot for Psychometric Evaluations

Silvia Rossi,Mariacarla Staffa,Gabriella Santangelo,Daniela Conti,Simone Varrasi,Alessandro Di Nuovo,Federica Garramone

doi:10.3390/robotics9020039

Abstract

Research and development in socially assistive robotics have produced several novel applications in the care of senior people. However, some are still unexplored such as their use as psychometric tools allowing for a quick and dependable evaluation of human users’ intellectual capacity. To fully exploit the application of a social robot as a psychometric tool, it is necessary to account for the users’ factors that might influence the interaction with a robot and the evaluation of user cognitive performance. To this end, we invited senior participants to use a prototype of a robot-led cognitive test and analyzed the influence of personality traits and user’s empathy on the cognitive performance and technology acceptance. Results show a positive influence of a personality trait, the “openness to experience”, on the human-robot interaction, and that other factors, such as anxiety, trust, and intention to use, are influencing technology acceptance and correlate the evaluation by psychometric tests.

Highlights

The number of older people living alone and in need of care has grown to become one of the great societal challenges of the most developed countries (e.g., Europe, USA, Japan, Australia)
Summarizing, starting from our preliminary study in [12], in which the psychometric assessment evaluation process supported by a social robot has been presented, we extend this work by (i) investigating the cognitive and personality factors that might influence the human-robot interaction and user performance with a fully autonomous robot working as a cognitive assessment tool with a population of 19 elderly; (ii) analyzing the influence of empathy both on the acceptance of robotic technology and on users’ cognitive test performance; (iii) analyzing possible changes in technology acceptance after the very first interaction with the robot
This article presented an approach to cognitive assessment that makes use of social robots to administer psychometric tests and collect the data for the assessment via a pre-programmed human-robot interaction

Summary

Introduction

The number of older people living alone and in need of care has grown to become one of the great societal challenges of the most developed countries (e.g., Europe, USA, Japan, Australia). High-income countries have the oldest population profiles, with more than 20% of the population predicted to be over 65 in 2050, when citizens older than 80 years old will be triple that of today This is a challenge for social care systems, which, as of are struggling to meet the demand of assistance for vulnerable adults because of limitations in their budgets and in the difficulty of recruiting new skilled workers. The literature in assistive robotics that tries to address the psychometric evaluation is quite limited This is due to the skepticism of the practitioners [23] and to the perception of users on the reliability shown by the robots [24]. We argue that, since an essential characteristic of psycho-diagnostic tests is that the stimuli and the methods for their administration should be just as rigorously standardized to guarantee the reliability (i.e., its repeatability in different times and places) and the validity of the results, assistive robots can represent a valuable way to meet these requirements and provide a reliable automatic tool for psychometric assessment [10,11,12,13,25,26]

Methods

Results

Conclusion