Socially Pertinent Robots in Gerontological Healthcare

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 an autonomous 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 including 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’s perception and action skills are robust to environmental clutter and flexible to handle a plethora of different interactions. We also report and discuss some concerns and general comments of the users.