M. Pino

Affective and Engagement Issues in the Conception and Assessment of a Robot-Assisted Psychomotor Therapy for Persons with Dementia

The interest in robot-assisted therapies (RAT) for dementia care has grown steadily in recent years. However, RAT using humanoid robots is still a novel practice for which the adhesion mechanisms, indications and benefits remain unclear. Also, little is known about how the robots behavioral and affective style might promote engagement of persons with dementia (PwD) in RAT. The present study sought to investigate the use of a humanoid robot in a psychomotor therapy for PwD. We examined the robots potential to engage participants in the intervention and its effect on their emotional state. A brief psychomotor therapy program involving the robot as the therapists assistant was created. For this purpose, a corpus of social and physical behaviors for the robot and a “control software” for customizing the program and operating the robot were also designed. Particular attention was given to components of the RAT that could promote participants engagement (robots interaction style, personalization of contents). In the pilot assessment of the intervention nine PwD (7 women and 2 men, M age = 86 y/o) hospitalized in a geriatrics unit participated in four individual therapy sessions: one classic therapy (CT) session (patient- therapist) and three RAT sessions (patient-therapist-robot). Outcome criteria for the evaluation of the intervention included: participants engagement, emotional state and well-being; satisfaction of the intervention, appreciation of the robot, and empathy-related behaviors in human-robot interaction (HRI). Results showed a high constructive engagement in both CT and RAT sessions. More positive emotional responses in participants were observed in RAT compared to CT. RAT sessions were better appreciated than CT sessions. The use of a social robot as a mediating tool appeared to promote the involvement of PwD in the therapeutic intervention increasing their immediate wellbeing and satisfaction.

Innovative Technology-Based Healthcare and Support Services for Older Adults: How and Why Industrial Initiatives Convert to the Living Lab Approach

To support older adults with age-related or chronic diseases living in the community, suppliers are increasingly turning to Personal Health Systems (PHS) for remote care delivery. Despite the advantages of PHS, implementing these systems brings on several challenges on the technical level, but also related to the diversity of end-users, the characteristics of the ecosystem, the innovation process itself, regulatory and social aspects. To discuss these issues, we study two different PHS currently under implementation and deployment by two French companies: a telehealth service for frail older adults living at home and a GPS-based monitoring service to deal with wandering and disorientation of persons with dementia. We describe and compare problematic situations faced by these companies on three levels - demand, supply, and context- and explain why they decided to evolve towards a Living Lab approach to improve technology acceptance and social and economic return on investment.

Towards attention monitoring of older adults with cognitive impairment during interaction with an embodied conversational agent

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are virtual characters using verbal and non-verbal communication for Human-machine interaction. The aim of our research is to create an ECA-based user interface for assistive technologies targeting older adults with cognitive impairment. Our design methodology is a co-design living lab approach, collecting design guidelines through questionnaires, focus groups and user trials. In this paper, we report on the results of the first phase of this iterative design process. We developed Louise, a semi-automatic ECA prototype that aims to compensate, through attention monitoring, for a users attentional disorders by performing autonomous prompting, i.e., calling the user to regain his or her attention in case he or she got distracted. We evaluated the performance of Louise with a group of experts in assistive technologies and collected their feedback. Louises simple attention estimator is more than 80% accurate. The system got quite positive reviews from users.

Acceptance of social assistive robots to support older adults with cognitive impairment and their caregivers

low (very poor or poor) for overall scientific validity and reliability. In terms of appropriateness of the human-computer interface for an older adult population, the majority of tests (10/16) scored fair across all criteria. The scores for ethics-associated factors were the lowest over all criteria evaluated, a majority of tests scored very poor (9/16), and the remainder (7/16) scored poor.Conclusions:Overall, the scientific quality of freely accessible tests online is low and these tests conform poorly to conventional guidelines around consent, conflict of interest and other ethical considerations. These findings have significant implications for the growing computer-literate older adult population. The issues uncovered suggest that further evidence and informed policy are needed to promote the greatest benefits from tools and information available on the Internet.