Evaluation of Human Robot Interaction Factors of a Socially Assistive Robot Together with Older People

This paper describes the evaluation of human-robot-interaction (HRI) related to the future use of a humanoid robotic system as interface in intelligent home environments. The core motivation was to enhance the user interaction between smart home systems and senior users by introducing a humanoid, mobile socially assistive robot as user interface. To what extend older users accept and use the autonomous robot as interface is the central research topic covered in this paper. To evaluate this question a user evaluation was performed together with 16 older people within the "Living Lab Schwechat" in Austria [15] and a senior citizen home in Tel Aviv, Israel. Detailed results covering user acceptance, the users' attitude towards the robot, perception of the robot by the users and scores regarding the naturalness, animacy and intelligence of the tested system are presented and recommendations for improvements of the system are given.