The influence of social presence on acceptance of a companion robot by older people

Abstract

Abstract-If robotic companions are to be used in the near future by aging adults, they have to be accepted by them. In the process of developing a methodology to measure, predict and explain acceptance of robotic companions, we researched the influence of social abilities, social presence and perceived enjoyment. After an experiment (n=30) that included collecting usage data and a second experiment (n=40) with a robot in a more and less sociable condition we were able to confirm the relevance of these concepts. Results suggest that social abilities contribute to the sense of social presence when interacting with a robotic companion and this leads, through higher enjoyment to a higher acceptance score.

Relating conversational expressiveness to social presence and acceptance of an assistive social robot

“…We hypothesize that also for our user group, a higher score on the construct of social presence will correlate with a higher score on conversational expressiveness. As in earlier research (Heerink et al 2008), we found a higher score on social presence to correlate with a higher score on acceptance (as indicated by the expressed intention to use the system), we suspect conversational expressiveness to correlate with intention to use.…”

“…Furthermore, there are factors like enjoyment, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, attitude, and anxiety that influence acceptance (Venkatesh et al 2003;Heerink et al 2008), and future results could explore their relation with conversational expressiveness and social presence. This would not only provide a more complete picture of the relationship between conversational behavior in humanrobot interaction and acceptance, it would also tell us more about what enhances the sense of social presence for this particular user group.…”

“…In an earlier study, we found a crucial role for social presence in the process of functional and conversational acceptance of embodied agent technology (Heerink et al 2008). Therefore, we intend to incorporate measuring social presence when measuring acceptance of social assistive robots and screen agents.…”

The Effect of Emotions and Social Behavior on Performance in a Collaborative Serious Game Between Humans and Autonomous Robots

“…It might have an influence on task performance, where impoverished social presence undermines it [25]. If human players perceived artificial opponents as not socially present, their enjoyment would decrease while interacting with them [63]. Social presence was found to be important for understanding another agent's intentions [6].…”

Catz, Dogz & Robotz? Human interaction with domestic robotic devices

“…The next paper by Heerink [20] also makes use of the iCat in a user study -this time in an application featuring older people as end-users. The idea that the older population might find great benefit in the future from social robots has great potential though its an area that also raises complex ethical issues [21].…”