IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2019 - 61

Table 1. The demographics of participants and the number of people they interact with in the community.
Demographic

Participant Breakdown

Gender

Women (13), men (6)

Previous employment*

Business (2), clergy/religious life (11), higher education teaching (2), medicine (2), primary/
secondary education teaching (4), social work (1), computer programming (1)

Marital status

Widowed (4), married (2), divorced (0), single/never married (13)

Self-reported number of social
connections in community

Two to 10 people

*Some participants overlapped categories across multiple careers. For example, one was a nun but also a primary school educator.

Methods
Research Questions
Our inclusive, human-centered design methodology leverages a repertoire of participatory design activities that enable
older adults to provide feedback and share preferences to
guide our future social robot development. We focused our
investigation on older adult's perceptions of social connections within their community and their perspectives on a
social robot for community use. Our research was guided by
the following questions:
● How do older adults currently perceive their social connections within their community?
● What are older adults' design preferences for social robots?
Why?
● How does the presence of a social robot technology shape
older adults' interactions within their community, and how
do they view their social connections?
Study Context
Our study took place at a California-based assisted-living
community. Seventy-two older adults were invited to participate in our study. The facility provides meals, assistance
with daily care, and medication administration as needed.
The members have access to a calendar of events, including
exercises, spiritual services, art and music therapies, discussion groups, and excursions to nearby cities. There are at
least five scheduled groups or activities each day, facilitated
by creative arts therapists, life enrichment staff members,
chaplains, volunteers, or residents, and at least two large
social gatherings each month to celebrate holidays or bring
people together. The residents also have access to new technologies, including digital art and photography and sessions
in a computer lab.
Participant Demographics
A total of 19 older adults from a range of demographic
backgrounds volunteered to engage in interviews and social
robot preference workshops, where they expressed their
thoughts about social connection in their facility and social
robot technology. They also interacted casually with the
robot on their residential floors. Participants had been briefly exposed to the particular social robot used in the study

three or four times prior to the start of the study. However,
none of those exposures occurred within the six months
leading up to the start of data collection, helping mitigate
the technology's novelty effects. The participants were
between 67 and 99 years of age (female 68%; median age:
M = 84.8; standard deviation: SD = 7.13), with varied educational backgrounds ranging from high school diplomas
through graduate degrees. Additional demographics are listed in Table 1. With regard to technology use, the most utilized technology items were computers and smartphones
(29% and 26%, respectively). A notable percentage of the
population (26%) used no gadgetry. A good portion used
tablets and landline phones (18% each). One participant had
adopted the latest voice-activated technology.
Data Collection
Our data collection focus was on the broader social context
involving multiple participants: the social and physical environment and the interplay between people and their environment, similar to the social shaping of technology framework
used in [6]. All of the volunteers completed an institutional
review board-approved consent form. No incentives were
offered. The researchers introduced the robot on the first day
of the study through casual conversation that established a
dialogue around the technology and emphasized empowering
older adults to discuss social robots and social connections.
In our study, we used a commercial social robot called
Jibo (Figure 1) that was designed to assist and attend to

Figure 1. Jibo, the social robot used in this study.

JUNE 2019

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2019

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