Home // ACHI 2020, The Thirteenth International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interactions // View article
Authors:
Berardina De Carolis
Valeria Carofiglio
Ilaria Grimandli
Nicola Macchiarulo
Giuseppe Palestra
Olimpia Pino
Keywords: Social Assistive Robots, Cognitive impairment, Cognitive Stimulation, Elderly people
Abstract:
Social Assistive Robotics (SAR) has successfully been used in health-care interventions from the functional and socio-emotional points of view. In particular, they have been used in therapeutic interventions for elderly people affected by cognitive impairments. This paper reports of our research aiming at investigating the role of the social robot Pepper in aiding therapists during cognitive stimulation sessions for elders with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Mild Dementia (MD). To this purpose, an experimental study was performed with a group of 8 participants in a 3-weeks cognitive stimulation program. To assess and monitor the results, each session was video recorded for further analyses. The collected videos were analyzed by three human raters, in order to evaluate them in terms of participation and engagement operationalized as eye gazes, number of correct answers and displayed emotions. Results show that Pepper has been positively accepted by the seniors, who were very attentive and involved in session tasks, during which the participants have rarely experienced negative emotions. Moreover, some correlations between the gathered data also emerged that emphasize the effectiveness of the proposed approach. In particular, seniors with lower impairments experienced less happiness; however, they were very engaged during the training with the robot.
Pages: 452 to 457
Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2020
Publication date: March 22, 2020
Published in: conference
ISSN: 2308-4138
ISBN: 978-1-61208-761-0
Location: Valencia, Spain
Dates: from November 21, 2020 to November 25, 2020