We have developed a Robot Assisted Activity (RAA) program for recreational use in health care facilities for elderly people. The RAA program has been evaluated in such a facility to assess its usefulness. The program applies a standard classroom model, starting with homeroom and including lessons in the Japanese language, music, gymnastics, arithmetic, and other subjects. At the end of the program, there is a graduation ceremony. We use a video camera to record each scene. Each behavior and utterance of the participants is then analyzed. In addition, immediately upon completion of the RAA program, specialists conduct a Focus Group Interview (FGI) in which they collect comments, opinions, and requests from the participants. Ten elderly people participate in the program, two men and eight women (81.0±3.7 years old). All are residents at a health care facility in Aichi Prefecture, Japan. TheMMSE (MiniMental State Examination) score indicating the level of dementia is 24.1±3.0 points. Two participants are judged to be in a moderate stage of cognitive decline (21 points or less), six are in a mild stage (22-26 points), and the remaining two are normal. On the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), in which a score of 13.3±4.2 points indicates a state of depression, seven participants are judged to be depressive (11 points or more). The results of our study show that all participants have a favorable impression of the robot and nearly all have a positive opinion of the RAA program. This suggests that the program can be used for emotional and recreational therapy at health care facilities for the elderly. However, in spite of the overall success of the RAA program, we seldom observe interaction between participants and the robot.

Abstruct: The "Ifbot" robot communicates with people by considering its own "emotions" . Ifbot has many facial expressions to communicate enjoyment. We first attempted to extract characteristics of Ifbot's facial expressions by mapping these to its emotional space, which we discuss in this paper. We applied a five-layer perceptron to the extraction . We also propose a method of seamlessly changing facial expressions using the emotional space. We report on some results of facial changes obtained with the proposed method .

In line with the effects of Japan's aging society with fewer children, the number of elderly with dementia who live alone and without care is increasing, therefore at-home care is beginning to be required. Doll therapy is a way of at-home dementia care. Doll therapy can help improve mental status of the elderly, because their logical and rational thinking is activated by imaging the child care experience with feeling and emotion at the times. In this research, we consider using Babyloid, a baby type robot, for doll therapy. As a first step of this research, we investigated whether elderly people in a nursing home for the elderly home accept Babyloid.

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