Abstract
The present research aims at investigating effects of participants’ age (middle-aged and seniors) and type of assistive device (female virtual agents vs female android robots) on users’ acceptance. The study involved 4 groups of two middle-aged and two seniors (for a total of 181) participants asked to ex- press their potential acceptance to be assisted in their daily routines by two female android robots/virtual agents. Acceptance was assessed in terms of scores assigned by participants to their willingness to interact with the female agents/robots and pragmatic (PQ), hedonic - identity (HQI), hedonic - feeling (HQF) and attractiveness (ATT) qualities. Video clips of the proposed agents or robots were randomly presented, and after each presentation, participants scored the proposed assistive device by filling either the VAAQ (Virtual Agent Acceptance) or the RAQ (Robot Acceptance) questionnaire. Repeated measures ANOVA were utilized to statistically assess participants’ preferences. Seniors were significantly more open to interact with virtual agents rather than robots, while middle-aged participants were showed slightly more open to interact with robots rather than agents. Participants’ gender significantly affected the evaluation of robots rather than agents’ one, and the appearance of the proposed de- vices (younger toward mature agents, or haired toward hairless robots), strongly affected users’ acceptance.
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Acknowledgement
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N. 769872 (EMPATHIC) and N. 823907 (MENHIR), from the project SIROBOTICS that received funding from Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università, e della Ricerca (MIUR), PNR 2015–2020, Decreto Direttoriale 1735 July 13 2017, and from the project ANDROIDS that received funding from Università della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli” inside the programme V:ALERE 2019, funded with D.R. 906 del 4/10/2019, prot. n. 157264, October 17, 2019.
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Esposito, A., Amorese, T., Cuciniello, M., Cavallo, F., Vinciarelli, A., Cordasco, G. (2022). Comparing Middle-Aged and Seniors’ Preferences Toward Virtual Agents and Android Robots: Is There a Generational Shift in Assistive Technologies’ Preferences?. In: Bettelli, A., Monteriù, A., Gamberini, L. (eds) Ambient Assisted Living. ForItAAL 2020. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 884. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08838-4_6
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