Towards emotionally aligned social robots for dementia: perspectives of care partners and persons with dementia.
Journal:
Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association
PMID:
36537516
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Persons living with dementia and their care partners place a high value on aging in place and maintaining independence. Socially assistive robots - embodied characters or pets that provide companionship and aid through social interaction - are a promising tool to support these goals. There is a growing commercial market for these devices, with functions including medication reminders, conversation, pet-like behaviours, and even the collection of health data. While potential users generally report positive feelings towards social robots, persons with dementia have been under-included in design and development, leading to a disconnect between robot functions and the real-world needs and desires of end-users. Furthermore, a key element of social and emotional connectedness in human relationships is emotional alignment - a state where all partners have congruent emotional understandings of a situation. Strong emotional alignment between users and robots will be necessary for social robots to provide meaningful companionship, but a computational model of how to achieve this has been absent from the field. To this end, we propose and test Affect Control Theory (ACT) as a framework to improve emotional alignment between older adults and social robotics.