Despite the many recent achievements in developing and deploying social robotics, there are still many underexplored environments and applications for which systematic evaluation of such systems by end-users is necessary. While several robotic platforms have been used in gerontological healthcare, the question of whether or not a social interactive robot with multi-modal conversational capabilities will be useful and accepted in real-life facilities is yet to be answered. This paper is an attempt to partially answer this question, via two waves of experiments with patients and companions in a day-care gerontological facility in Paris with a full-sized humanoid robot endowed with social and conversational interaction capabilities. The software architecture, developed during the H2020 SPRING project, together with the experimental protocol, allowed us to evaluate the acceptability (AES) and usability (SUS) with more than 60 end-users. Overall, the users are receptive to this technology, especially when the robot perception and action skills are robust to environmental clutter and flexible to handle a plethora of different interactions.
View on arXiv@article{alameda-pineda2025_2404.07560,
title={ Socially Pertinent Robots in Gerontological Healthcare },
author={ Xavier Alameda-Pineda and Angus Addlesee and Daniel Hernández García and Chris Reinke and Soraya Arias and Federica Arrigoni and Alex Auternaud and Lauriane Blavette and Cigdem Beyan and Luis Gomez Camara and Ohad Cohen and Alessandro Conti and Sébastien Dacunha and Christian Dondrup and Yoav Ellinson and Francesco Ferro and Sharon Gannot and Florian Gras and Nancie Gunson and Radu Horaud and Moreno DÍncà and Imad Kimouche and Séverin Lemaignan and Oliver Lemon and Cyril Liotard and Luca Marchionni and Mordehay Moradi and Tomas Pajdla and Maribel Pino and Michal Polic and Matthieu Py and Ariel Rado and Bin Ren and Elisa Ricci and Anne-Sophie Rigaud and Paolo Rota and Marta Romeo and Nicu Sebe and Weronika Sieińska and Pinchas Tandeitnik and Francesco Tonini and Nicolas Turro and Timothée Wintz and Yanchao Yu },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.07560},
year={ 2025 }
}