Tulsulkar Gauri, Mishra Nidhi, Thalmann Nadia Magnenat, Lim Hwee Er, Lee Mei Ping, Cheng Siok Khoong
Institute of Media Innovation, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore.
MIRALab, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Vis Comput. 2021;37(12):3019-3038. doi: 10.1007/s00371-021-02242-y. Epub 2021 Jul 30.
Social Assistive Robotics is increasingly being used in care settings to provide psychosocial support and interventions for the elderly with cognitive impairments. Most of these social robots have provided timely stimuli to the elderly at home and in care centres, including keeping them active and boosting their mood. However, previous investigations have registered shortcomings in these robots, particularly in their ability to satisfy an essential human need: the need for companionship. Reports show that the elderly tend to lose interests in these social robots after the initial excitement as the novelty wears out and the monotonous familiarity becomes all too familiar. This paper presents our research facilitating conversations between a social humanoid robot, Nadine, and cognitively impaired elderly at a nursing home. We analysed the effectiveness of human-humanoid interactions between our robot and 14 elderly over 29 sessions. We used both objective tools (based on computer vision methods) and subjective tools (based on observational scales) to evaluate the recorded videos. Our findings showed that our subjects engaged positively with Nadine, suggesting that their interaction with the robot could improve their well-being by compensating for some of their emotional, cognitive, and psychosocial deficiencies. We detected emotions associated with cognitively impaired elderly during these interactions. This study could help understand the expectations of the elderly and the current limitations of Social Assistive Robots. Our research is aligned with all the ethical recommendations by the NTU Institutional Review Board.
社交辅助机器人越来越多地被用于护理环境中，为认知障碍的老年人提供心理社会支持和干预。这些社交机器人大多在家中和护理中心为老年人提供了及时的刺激，包括让他们保持活跃和改善情绪。然而，此前的调查发现这些机器人存在缺陷，尤其是在满足人类一项基本需求方面：陪伴需求。报告显示，随着新鲜感逐渐消退，单调感日益凸显，老年人在最初的兴奋过后往往会对这些社交机器人失去兴趣。本文介绍了我们在一家养老院促进社交人形机器人纳丁与认知障碍老年人之间对话的研究。我们分析了在29次会话中机器人与14位老年人之间人机交互的有效性。我们使用了客观工具（基于计算机视觉方法）和主观工具（基于观察量表）来评估录制的视频。我们的研究结果表明，我们的受试者与纳丁积极互动，这表明他们与机器人的互动可以通过弥补他们在情感、认知和心理社会方面的一些不足来改善他们的幸福感。我们在这些互动中检测到了与认知障碍老年人相关的情绪。这项研究有助于了解老年人的期望以及社交辅助机器人目前的局限性。我们的研究符合南洋理工大学机构审查委员会的所有伦理建议。
