Socially assistive robots have the potential to help keep people with dementia cognitively active and entertained. This is important for their wellbeing. We explored staff perceptions of the acceptability of a new humanoid robot, Stevie, in an adult day care center for people with dementia. Stevie was deployed over 2 weeks in the day center to entertain 40 guests with dementia with three activities: (i) musical bingo, (ii) quizzes, and (iii) meet and greet. Nine staff members were asked what went well, whether the robot operated as expected, experiences of any technical issues, and the extent to which it hindered or aided their duties. Staff also rated guest engagement, guest enjoyment, and whether they were able to spend more time with guests. The sessions were successfully delivered. Staff reported that Stevie operated as expected, guest engagement with the robot was high, interactions with the robot were natural and the robot's novelty helped engagement. Use of the robot gave staff more time to attend to guests' needs. Suggested improvements included improvements to the robot's voice and adding a pause function during activities. With greater autonomy and/or extended use of its telepresence functionality, use of Stevie could become cost effective in such settings. Metropolitan University, and Conor McGinn worked for Trinity College Dublin. Angela Downing is Owner and Manager of the Reflections Day Center in Camborne, Cornwall, hosted the study and supervised the care staff and day center guests. Conor McGinn is the co-inventor of the Stevie Robot providing technical support in the set up of the study but was not involved in the operation or data collection for the evaluation. CONFLICT OF INTERESTConor Mc Ginn is a co-inventor of Stevie. However, he was not directly involved with the data collection and analysis of this study.

Demographic changes are putting the healthcare industry under pressure. However, while other industries have been able to automate their operation through robotic and autonomous systems, the healthcare sector is still reluctant to change. What makes robotic innovation in healthcare so difficult? Despite offering more efficient, and consumer-friendly care, the assistive robotics market has lacked penetration. To answer this question, we have broken down the development process, taking a market transformation perspective. By interviewing assistive robotics companies at different business stages from France and the UK, this paper identifies new insight into the main barriers of the assistive robotics market that are inhibiting the sector. Their impact is analysed during the different stages of the development, exploring how these barriers affect the planning, conceptualisation and adoption of these solutions. This research presents a foundation for understanding innovation barriers that high-tech ventures face in the healthcare industry, and the need for public policy measures to support these technology-based firms.

While assistive robotics (AR) have shown promise in supporting seniors with daily life activities and psycho-social development, evaluation of AR systems present novel challenges. From a technical point of view, reproducing HRI experiments has been problematic due to the lack of protocols, standardization, and benchmarking tools, which ultimately impairs the evaluation of previous experiments. On the other hand, working with seniors with cognitive decline presents a major design challenge for researchers, since communication skills, state of mind and attention of participants is compromised. To address these challenges, this paper presents practical recommendations and a protocol for conducting HRI experiments with seniors with mid cognitive decline (MCI).