IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2019 - 60

materials in their common areas. Our results provide evidence that social robots can successfully enhance senior citizens' community engagement and social connectedness.
Meeting a Growing Need
As the worldwide population ages [1], the opportunity to
develop innovative technologies to support, engage, and interest older adults increases. The older adult population is hardly
monolithic, including as it does people from a wide variety of
backgrounds and technology experiences [1]. Social connectedness and close relationships, the key components of community interaction, are essential contributors to human
welfare [2]. Unfortunately, social isolation is one of the greatest threats to elderly people's mental, physical, and psychological health [1]. Innovative technologies that foster and
support face-to-face human connection within communities,
rather than competing with or diminishing it, represent an
important design and technology challenge.
As older adults become more open to new technologies
[3], social robots are a particularly interesting device for the
elderly, combining utility with companion-like qualities [4].
Prior work reports on their ability to reduce stress and provide wellness benefits [5]. However, only a few have explored
the potential of social robots to facilitate and promote social
engagement between older adults within a community setting [6], [7]. In general, there are very few long-term studies,
in part because of the lack of user-friendly, reliable robotic
platforms that can operate over long-term deployments in
senior communities.
Our work explores the use of a social robot in assisted living, characterizing the robot's impact at the community level
over three weeks. Specifically, we performed a mixed-method
analysis of older adults' community engagement and social
connectedness while a social robot was placed in each of the
common spaces throughout the building. Our materials were
designed to support an adaptive methodology to fit a range of
older adults' cognitive and physical abilities. In this article, we
report our findings, which include qualitative and quantitative investigation into participants' social connectedness. The
use and analysis of a design kit yielded insights for the development and employment of social robots with older adults.
Overall, this study provides an integrated participatory design
and community-based approach, demonstrating the importance for studies to emphasize older adults' direct experience
with social robots to understand community change and
empower older adults to think critically about their preferences for social robot functions and design.
Literature Review
Older Adults, Technology, and Social
Connectedness
Building social community is an ongoing process within
communities of older adults [8]. Recent studies indicate that
older adults are increasingly open to technology-based
opportunities for social connection, such as social media and
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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

JUNE 2019

video calls [3]. For instance, digital assistants in the form of
smart speakers have recently been explored within assistedliving communities [9], where 60% of participants reported
an increase in feelings of connectedness to their family,
friends, and community through using the technology.
Social Robots and Social Connectedness
Social robots can provide companionship and social interaction with older adults [6], [7], [10]. Their social embodiment
is physically copresent with others, using such characteristics
as eye gaze, gestures, and emotional expressions to facilitate
social relationships [4], even within a group. While prior work
has focused on human-to-robot interaction, our work explores
the role of a robot as a catalyst for people's social lives. Specifically, we investigate the effectiveness of social robots in mediating and facilitating group-level human-to-human connections.
Our question was, if social robots can foster interpersonal
interactions in communities, can they positively affect in-person social closeness among the members of the community?
Social robots have been explored in the context of older
adults for many years, including Paro (an animal-therapyinspired robot) [5]-[7], [10] and Care-o-bot [11]. Long-term
interaction studies with social robots led to positive psychological and physical benefits for older adults [5]. The effects of
a social robot on community bondedness were first studied
qualitatively with Paro in senior citizen communities [7].
Social interaction and play among the community members
increased significantly with the robot turned on, suggesting
that the social robot promoted human-to-human interactions. However, this study was short term and did not investigate long-term effects.
Chang and Šabanović found that the adoption of Paro in a
nursing home setting over three months was reliant on the
robot being introduced by a community member [6]. To our
knowledge, this is the only example of a community-focused
approach to understanding the effect of social robots in an
older-adults community, but it did not involve quantitative
measures or design participation by the users. As social robots
are continuing to be developed, deployed, and used in ways
that encourage human-to-robot interactions, research needs
to further understand how social robots can be vessels for
encouraging members of the community to interact with one
another and codesign the technology.
Methods of Studying Social Connectedness
A variety of human-centered participatory design methods
have been used to incorporate older adults in the technology
design process, e.g., interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, and ethnography [12]. While previous social robot
studies have engaged in participatory design with older
adults [10] or in community-based approaches [6], [7], we
take a more rigorous combined participatory design and
community-based approach, integrating qualitative and
quantitative methods, such as embedded ethnography [13]
and social robot preferences [14], to understand the opportunity for a robot to serve as a social catalyst.

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2019