Socially Pertinent Robots in Gerontological Healthcare

Xavier Alameda-Pineda1, Angus Addlesee5, Daniel Hernàndez Garcìa5, Chris Reinke1, Soraya Arias1, Federica Arrigoni4, Alex Auternaud1, Lauriane Blavette8, Cigdem Beyan4, Luis Gomez Camara1, Ohad Cohen3, Alessandro Conti4, Sébastien Dacunha8, Christian Dondrup5, Yoav Ellinson3, Francesco Ferro7, Sharon Gannot3, Florian Gras6, Nancie Gunson5, Radu Horaud1, Moreno D’Incà4, Imad Kimouche6, Séverin Lemaignan7, Oliver Lemon5, Cyril Liotard6, Luca Marchionni7, Mordehay Moradi3, Tomas Pajdla2, Maribel Pino8, Michal Polic2, Matthieu Py1, Ariel Rado3, Bin Ren4, Elisa Ricci4, Anne-Sophie Rigaud8, Paolo Rota4, Marta Romeo5, Nicu Sebe4, Weronika Sieińska5, Pinchas Tandeitnik3, Francesco Tonini4, Nicolas Turro1, Timothée Wintz1, and Yanchao Yu5

1 Inria
2 Czech Technical University in Prague
3 Bar-Ilan University
4 University of Trento
5 Heriot-Watt University
6 ERM Automatismes
7 PAL Robotics
8 Assistance Publique - Hopitaux de Paris

Despite the many recent achievements in developing and deploying social robotics, there are still many underexplored environments and applications for which systematic evaluation of such systems by end-users is necessary. While several robotic platforms have been used in gerontological healthcare, the question of whether or not a social interactive robot with multi-modal conversational capabilities will be useful and accepted in real-life facilities is yet to be answered. This paper is an attempt to partially answer this question, via two waves of experiments with patients and companions in a day-care gerontological facility in Paris with a full-sized humanoid robot endowed with social and conversational interaction capabilities. The software architecture, developed during the H2020 SPRING project, together with the experimental protocol, allowed us to evaluate the acceptability (AES) and usability (SUS) with more than 60 end-users. Overall, the users are receptive to this technology, especially when the robot perception and action skills are robust to environmental clutter and flexible to handle a plethora of different interactions.

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