Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Aging

Date Submitted: Sep 4, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 4, 2023 - Oct 30, 2023
Date Accepted: Mar 7, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

Positive Emotional Responses to Socially Assistive Robots in People With Dementia: Pilot Study

Otaka E, Osawa A, Kato K, Obayashi Y, Uehara S, Kamiya M, Mizuno K, Hashide S, Kondo I

Positive Emotional Responses to Socially Assistive Robots in People With Dementia: Pilot Study

JMIR Aging 2024;7:e52443

DOI: 10.2196/52443

PMID: 38623717

PMCID: 11034362

Positive emotional responses to socially assistive robots in people with dementia: a pilot study

  • Eri Otaka; 
  • Aiko Osawa; 
  • Kenji Kato; 
  • Yota Obayashi; 
  • Shintaro Uehara; 
  • Masaki Kamiya; 
  • Katsuhiro Mizuno; 
  • Shusei Hashide; 
  • Izumi Kondo

ABSTRACT

Background:

Interventions and care that can evoke positive emotions and reduce apathy or agitation are important in long-term care for people with dementia. Nonetheless, due to the increasing number of people with dementia, and the lack of caregivers, there are very few settings where such specialized care can be provided. Therefore, in recent years, socially assistive robots have been expected to be introduced into the settings of long-term care. However, it has not yet been elucidated enough how socially assistive robots are perceived by people with dementia.

Objective:

This study aimed to elucidate the immediate emotional reactions of people with dementia objectively and quantitatively to stimuli presented by socially assistive robots from the perspective of processing multiple sensory modalities. This study also examined the clinical characteristics of participants who exhibited positive emotional responses.

Methods:

This pilot study adopted a single-arm interventional design. Socially assistive robots were presented to nursing home residents in a three-step procedure: (1) the robot was placed in front of a participant (visual stimuli), (2) the robot was manipulated to produce sound (visual and auditory stimuli), and (3) participants held the robot in their hands (visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli). Expression intensity (EI) values were calculated using the facial expression analysis by FaceReaderTM. To identify the characteristics of those who showed positive responses, we defined the responder group as the participants whose EI value for “happy” was above average for more than half of all sessions. Basic characteristics and clinical measures were compared between the responder and the non-responder groups. Moreover, EI values for “happy” were compared across the aforementioned three stimuli patterns within each group.

Results:

A total of 29 participants (age mean [standard deviation] 88.7 [6.2] years, 27 females, the Japanese version of Mini-Mental State Examination 18.2 [5.1] points) were recruited. The responder group (n=7) demonstrated a significantly greater Barthel Index, which measures performance of basic activities of daily living (ADL), than the non-responder group (n=21) (85.0 [10.8] vs. 60.2 [25.7] points, p=0.017, effect size 1.072). There was a significant increase in the EI values for “happy” when all sensory modalities (visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli) were presented compared to the other two patterns (visual stimuli alone, or visual and auditory stimuli) in the non-responder group (p<0.001), but not in the responder group.

Conclusions:

Participants who showed positive responses to the socially assistive robots had higher ADLs. Even for those who are relatively unresponsive, the provision of various sensory stimulation elicited positive emotional responses. These results provide important insights into the effective use of socially assistive robots in dementia care. Clinical Trial: UMIN Clinical Trials Registry No. UMIN000046256.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Otaka E, Osawa A, Kato K, Obayashi Y, Uehara S, Kamiya M, Mizuno K, Hashide S, Kondo I

Positive Emotional Responses to Socially Assistive Robots in People With Dementia: Pilot Study

JMIR Aging 2024;7:e52443

DOI: 10.2196/52443

PMID: 38623717

PMCID: 11034362

Download PDF


Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.

© 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.