An Acceptance Test for Assistive Robots

Abstract

Socially assistive robots have been used in the care of elderly or dependent people, particularly with patients suffering from neurological diseases, like autism and dementia. There are some proposals, but there are no standardized mechanisms for assessing a particular robot’s suitability for specific therapy. This paper reports the evaluation of an acceptance test for assistive robots applied to people with dementia. The proposed test focuses on evaluating the suitability of a robot during therapy sessions. The test measures the rejection of the robot by the patient based on observational data. This test would recommend what kind of robot and what functionalities can be used in therapy. The novelty of this approach is the formalization of a specific validation process that only considers the reaction of the person to whom the robot is applied, and may be used more effectively than existing tests, which may not be adequate for evaluating assistance robots. The test’s feasibility was tested by applying it to a set of dementia patients in a specialized care facility.

Acceptance of Industrial Collaborative Robots by People With Disabilities in Sheltered Workshops

“…For this evaluation, a combination of direct observation and recorded observation was used to capture all possible aspects, since commonly used questionnaires are not applicable for the special target group. This is an approach proposed by Martín Rico et al ( 2020 ), who use observers' assessments and observations to rate the acceptance of a humanoid robot by people with dementia. They argue that commonly used questionnaires like the NARS do not always lead to reliable results that agree with observations (Martín Rico et al, 2020 ).…”

“…This is an approach proposed by Martín Rico et al ( 2020 ), who use observers' assessments and observations to rate the acceptance of a humanoid robot by people with dementia. They argue that commonly used questionnaires like the NARS do not always lead to reliable results that agree with observations (Martín Rico et al, 2020 ). In addition to these points, a qualitative measurement is preferable for this study since it is infeasible to have a huge number of participants in the SW and even then, the strong heterogeneity would make drawing statistical conclusions difficult.…”

Feeling of Safety and Comfort towards a Socially Assistive Unmanned Aerial Vehicle That Monitors People in a Virtual Home

“…Therefore, it seems vital to understand how home drones are perceived and understood by inhabitants to be fully accepted [ 2 ]. Within the broad class of personal robots, assistive robots for the elderly use to be grouped into rehabilitation and socially assistive robots [ 3 ]. The manner in which people accept social assistive robots in their life is still unknown [ 1 ].…”

Feeling of Safety and Comfort Towards a Socially Assistive Unmanned Aerial Vehicle That Monitors People in a Virtual Home

“…Therefore, it seems vital to understand how home drones are perceived and understood by inhabitants to be fully accepted [2]. Within the broad class of personal robots, assistive robots for the elderly use to be grouped into rehabilitation and socially assistive robots [3]. The manner people accept social assistive robots in their life is still unknown [1].…”

“…For this reason, the acceptability of social assistive robots is an essential aspect to overcome the resistance toward them. This is why, acceptance tests for assistive robots caring of elder adults are being highly demanded [3,4].…”