Improving video communication for elderly or disabled by coordination of robot's active listening behaviors and media controls

In this paper, we propose and evaluate a video communication system that compensates for user's uncongenial attitudes by coordinating the robot's behaviors and media control of the video. The system facilitates comfortable video communications between elderly or disabled people by an assistant robot for each user that expresses (a) active listening behaviors to compensate for the listener's attitude when he/she is not really listening to another user's talking and (b) a cover-up behavior (gaze turned to the user) to divert attention from the other user's uncongenial attitude when that person is not looking at the talking user but toward the robot at her/his side; this behavior is performed by coordinating the automatic switching of cameras to give the impression that the congenial person is still looking at the user. The results obtained in the system evaluation show the significant effectiveness of this design approach using the robot's behavior and media control of the video to compensate for the problems in video communication that we aimed to overcome.