Social Robots for Long-Term Interaction: A Survey

Two Paro robots were placed in common living rooms of a care house where elderly residents could interact with the robot over 9 hours a day. The interactions of the residents with PARO were video-recorded during this period. After one month, the results of 12 subjects indicated that PARO strengthened the social ties among the residents of the care house and that most residents established moderate or strong ties with the robot (e.g., greeting Paro when they pass by). Also, urine tests showed that after introducing PARO, the stress levels of the residents decreased.

Social robots have also been employed successfully in autism related therapy [11, 52]. To investigate the impact of robotic companions in autistic children, François et al. [19] conducted a study in which six children played with an AIBO robot (Fig. 1(c)) for approximately 40 minutes once a week for a total of 10 sessions.

The sessions were videorecorded and the behaviour of the children was later analysed according to three dimensions: play, reasoning and affect. Each child made progress in at least one of these three dimensions over the sessions. Children experienced progressively higher levels of play and developed more reasoning related to the robot (for example, by comparing AIBO to a real dog). Besides, they tended to express more interest towards the robot over the sessions, with occasional displays of affect.