Incorporating Affective Proactive Behavior to a Social Companion Robot for Community Dwelling Older Adults

Abstract

Virtual assistants, agents and social robots are becoming increasingly popular, assisting users in simple daily tasks. However, they are often mere voice-based interfaces to internet. In fact, they can be perceived as unnatural, unreliable and “inhuman” or distant, as they cannot support a fluid conversation and are not empathic. EVA is a socially assistive robot, created as an open platform, being extended by several research groups. It is an open source, modular, low-cost and conversational robot aimed at supporting Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs). We describe how interaction with this robot can be improved by incorporating proactivity, so that EVA is able to initiate conversations and care about the user, making the interaction more natural, social and affective. The two main steps to achieve this interaction are: a) with specific triggered events, EVA asks different proactive questions, when the user’s presence is detected and b) introducing the novel wakeface method, a more natural alternative to the traditional wakeword. With the proposed approach, the robot gets activates when looked at in its eyes. This ensures eye contact during the conversation, a common non-verbal communication strategy among humans, improving affects and trustworthiness. In this paper, the main functionalities of proactive EVA are described.