Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Oct 18, 2023)
Date Submitted: Aug 3, 2023
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Perceived and Morphological Preferences of Older Adults for Emotional Expression in a Child-like Characteristic Robot: Experimental Lab Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Elderly robots are used as an assistive tool to meet the needs of the elderly in their daily lives and provide care and other services while reducing the burden of healthcare. Robots with children's characteristics are able to generate more intimate interactions that affect users' emotional and psychological well-being, and users' perceptions and preferences for emotional expression of robots become key to enhancing the experience of using them.
Objective:
Under the smart elderly care service model oriented to the combination of medical and nursing care, we study the users' perceptual results and morphological preferences of the emotional expression of elderly companion robots in order to reduce the users' barriers to use and mistrust of the robots.
Methods:
Using literature analysis, we propose six design principles for the emotional expression of the child-like characteristics for the elderly companion robot CareBot, conducted statistical analysis of questionnaires through an experimental study of interaction with robots, and explored in depth the results of user evaluation of the robot through visualized data reports.
Results:
Participants were most able to identify three of these emotional expressions (enthusiastic, indifferent, and surprised), and participants' age and familiarity with children or smart products could have a significant effect on the assessment results. At the same time, the robot has a child-like feature form with big-eyed expressions, cute movements, and children's voices, which is more affinity to the elderly. The applicability and consistency of "expression" and "combination of expression and voice" in the principle of emotional expression is high.
Conclusions:
Appropriate child-like characteristics can enhance the emotional expression ability of companion robots, and designs that increase positive and decrease negative emotional expression of robots can help improve the acceptance of elderly companion robots.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.