Towards the acceptance of care robots by senior users

Abstract

The acceptance and usability of robots by their final users differs from the acceptance of other types of technological innovations, and these differences are even more accentuated in the case of Social Assistive Robotics intended for the senior people. In addition, it has to be taken into account that a robotic system that has only been tested with regular users may not meet older users’ expectations. For that reason, it becomes necessary to involve the said users in the design and testing process. On the other hand, in the robotics field, it is common practice to try and reuse robotic designs and implementations in different scenarios. However, in the particular case of social robotics, many developed services and robot behaviors do not translate well between domains or even subdomains. In the present paper, we present the results of the first interaction experiments between the humanoid robot Sacarino and two groups of users: middle-aged users under lab conditions and senior users in a care facility. Sacarino is a humanoid mobile robotic platform initially designed to provide information and accompany guests in a hotel. With the current experiments, we aim to explore the extent to which the results obtained in a hotel environment can be extrapolated to the assistive environment and if a robotic system intended for senior people can operate properly in real conditions, having only been tested with regular users.