The Elderly and Robots: From Experiments based on Comparison with Younger People

Robot factors such as motions and utterances have a possibility of interaction effects with generation and other human factors, and these effects influence robotics design in elder care. Some psychological experiments conducted in our research group found these interaction effects between generation and other factors based on directly comparison between younger and elder persons in interaction with a small-sized humanoid robot. The paper firstly reviews the previous two studies, reports results of the current experiment, and then discusses about their implications from the perspective of robotics design for elder care.