Socially assistive and service robotics for older adults: methodologies for motivating exercise and following spatial language instructions in discourse

Abstract

The growing population of aging adults is increasing the demand for healthcare services worldwide. Socially assistive robotics (SAR) and service robotics have the potential to aid in addressing the needs of the growing elderly population by promoting health benefits, independent living, and improved quality of life. For such robots to become ubiquitous in real?world human environments, they will need to interact with and learn from non?expert users in a manner that is both natural and practical for the users. In particular, such robots will need to be capable of understanding natural language instructions in order to learn new tasks and receive guidance and feedback on task execution. ? Research into SAR and service robotics?based solutions for non?expert users, and in particular older adults, that spans varied assistive tasks generally falls within one of two distinct areas: 1) robot?guided interaction, and 2) user?guided interaction. This dissertation contributes to both of these research areas. ? To address robot?guided interaction, this dissertation presents the design methodology, implementation and evaluation details of a novel SAR approach to motivate and engage elderly users in simple physical exercise. The approach incorporates insights from psychology research into intrinsic motivation and contributes five clear design principles for SAR?based therapeutic interventions. To evaluate the approach and its effectiveness in gaining user acceptance and motivating physical exercise, it was implemented as an integrated system and three user studies were conducted with older adults, to investigate: 1) the effect of praise and relational discourse in the system towards increasing user motivation