The When, Where, and How: An Adaptive Robotic Info-Terminal for Care Home Residents - A Long-Term Study

Adapting to users' intentions is a key requirement for autonomous robots in general, and in care settings in particular. In this paper, a comprehensive long-term study of a mobile robot providing information services to residents, visitors, and staff of a care home is presented, with a focus on adapting to the when and where the robot should be offering its services to best accommodate the users' needs. Rather than providing a fixed schedule, the presented system takes the opportunity of long-term deployment to explore the space of possibilities of interaction while concurrently exploiting the model learned to provide better services. But in order to provide effective services to users in a care home, not only then when and where are relevant, but also the way how the information is provided and accessed. Hence, also the usability of the deployed system is studied specifically, in order to provide a most comprehensive overall assessment of a robotic info-terminal implementation in a care setting. Our results back our hypotheses, (i) that learning a spatiotemporal model of users' intentions improves efficiency and usefulness of the system, and (ii) that the specific information sought after is indeed dependent on the location the info-terminal is offered.