A user-study with Tangy the Bingo facilitating robot and long-term care residents

Cognitive decline among the elderly decreases their independence and quality of life. Promoting engagement in recreational activities can help reduce this decline as such activities can provide both social and cognitive stimulation. For example, Bingo is a popular recreational activity in long-term care (LTC) facilities. However, activities such as Bingo have significant time and personnel requirements, and are becoming increasingly difficult to facilitate due to the current LTC staff shortages and an increasing demand for other LTC services. To address this problem, our research focuses on the development of the autonomous socially assistive robot Tangy which is being designed to facilitate needed multi-user recreational activities. In this paper, we present a pilot study conducted with Tangy facilitating multiple Bingo sessions with groups of elderly residents at a LTC facility. The study results showed that Tangy was able to autonomously and effectively facilitate Bingo games in real interaction settings by determining its appropriate assistive behaviors. Residents also had high compliance and engagement rates with respect to Tangy and the Bingo games. A post-interaction questionnaire showed that they enjoyed playing Bingo with Tangy, liked Tangy's socially interactive attributes, and would interact with it again in the future.