Overview

There have been many research and surveys show that elderly people values relationships with friends and family outweigh financial concerns and physical activities. Although many elderly people use smartphones, messaging tools and social media to connect with their family and friends, most of those technologies are not tailored to elderly people’s mental and physical characteristics, which is the big barrier for many elderly people to engage active social activities.

As more and more robotic technologies are applied to assist and companion the elderly people’s daily activities on a regular basis, few robots are designed to enhance elderly people’s social experience with their family and friends. Our project goal is to design and prototype a robot that is wholly intuitive for elderly people so that it can make elderly people’s social interaction with their family and friends more smooth and intimate.

To achieve this goal, we did literature review and competitive analysis to understand how elderly people communicate with their family and friend in general, conducted face-to-face interviews with the elderly people studying in Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Carnegie Mellon University(CMU) to identify their specific needs and concerns when communicate with their family and friends. After rapidly prototyped the robots based on the user interviews, we designed the user testing to test the key features with the real potential users, including video recording and messaging, social media filtering and reminding, and proximate interaction.

We found that the video recording and messaging are particularly valuable when the elderly users are doing the hands-full activities, such as gardening, knitting and cooking. The social media filtering and reminding can be unintentionally imposing while providing the elderly users more interactive opportunities with their family and friends. The proximate interaction experience between the robots and the elderly users are affected not only by the distance and the frequency, but also by the dynamic of the initiative. We also found that while we intended to enhance the human-to-human communication for elderly users, their expectation to the Curabot still heavily lie on the robot-to-human interaction and they have mixed feeling about the Curabot: they believe the robot can be a friend but they are afraid of this possibility too.

Based on these user testing feedback and findings, we planned the future steps:

First, strengthen the video recording and messaging feature and add daily to-do reminder (e.g. remind the elder user to take medication);

Second, improve the voice command interfaces to make the robot-to-user interaction more smoother ;

Third, re-design the CuraBot appearance to give it more personality and character.