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Robot therapy for elderly residents in a care house has been conducted since June 2005. Two therapeutic seal robots were introduced and activated for over 9 hours every day to interact with the residents. This paper presents a progress report of this experiment. In order to investigate the psychological and social effects of the robots, each subject was interviewed by using the free pile sort method, and their social interaction was analysed. In addition, their hormones in urine: 17 -Ketosteroid sulfate (17-KS-S) and 17hydroxycorticosteroids (17-OHCS) were obtained and analysed. The results showed that the robots encouraged them to communicate with each other and then strengthened their social ties over the two months. Furthermore, urine tests showed that the reactions of the subjects' vital organs to stress were improved after the introduction of the robots.

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Abstract-We are developing an interactive service robot which provides personal greetings to customers, using a machine-learning approach based on observations of a customer's appearance or behavior from on-board or environmental sensors. For each visit, several features are recorded, such as "time of day" or "number of people in group." A set of classifiers trained by human coders compare the current features with the person's individual history, to determine an appropriate feature for a robot to speak about. This system enables the robot to make context-appropriate comments such as "good morning, you're here very early today." We present the design of our system and an encouraging set of preliminary prediction results based on one month of data taken from real customers at a shopping mall. IndexTerms-Human-robot interaction, long-term interaction