A Multimodal Robot-Driven Meeting Facilitation System for Group Decision-Making Sessions

Abstract

Group meetings are ubiquitous, with millions of meetings held across the world every day. However, meeting quality, group performance, and outcomes are challenged by a variety of dysfunctional behaviors, unproductive social dynamics, and lack of experience in conducting efficient and productive meetings. Previous studies have shown that meeting facilitators can be advantageous in helping groups reach their goals more effectively, but many groups do not have access to human facilitators due to a lack of resources or other barriers. In this paper, we describe the development of a multimodal robotic meeting facilitator that can improve the quality of small group decision-making meetings. This automated group facilitation system uses multimodal sensor inputs (user gaze, speech, prosody, and proxemics), as well as inputs from a tablet application, to intelligently enforce meeting structure, promote time management, balance group participation, and facilitate group decision-making processes. Results of a between-subject study of 20 user groups (N=40) showed that the robot facilitator is accepted by group members, is effective in enforcing meeting structure, and users found it helpful in balancing group participation. We also report design implications derived from the findings of our study.