Emotional Interaction between Artificial Companion Agents and the Elderly
📝 Abstract
Artificial companion agents are defined as hardware or software entities designed to provide companionship to a person. The senior population are facing a special demand for companionship. Artificial companion agents have been demonstrated to be useful in therapy, offering emotional companionship and facilitating socialization. However, there is lack of empirical studies on what the artificial agents should do and how they can communicate with human beings better. To address these functional research problems, we attempt to establish a model to guide artificial companion designers to meet the emotional needs of the elderly through fulfilling absent roles in their social interactions. We call this model the Role Fulfilling Model. This model aims to use role as a key concept to analyse the demands from the elderly for functionalities from an emotional perspective in artificial companion agent designs and technologies. To evaluate the effectiveness of this model, we proposed a serious game platform named Happily Aging in Place. This game will help us to involve a large scale of senior users through crowdsourcing to test our model and hypothesis. To improve the emotional communication between artificial companion agents and users, This book draft addresses an important but largely overlooked aspect of affective computing: how to enable companion agents to express mixed emotions with facial expressions? And furthermore, for different users, do individual heterogeneity affects the perception of the same facial expressions? Some preliminary results about gender differences have been found. The perception of facial expressions between different age groups or cultural backgrounds will be held in future study.
💡 Analysis
Artificial companion agents are defined as hardware or software entities designed to provide companionship to a person. The senior population are facing a special demand for companionship. Artificial companion agents have been demonstrated to be useful in therapy, offering emotional companionship and facilitating socialization. However, there is lack of empirical studies on what the artificial agents should do and how they can communicate with human beings better. To address these functional research problems, we attempt to establish a model to guide artificial companion designers to meet the emotional needs of the elderly through fulfilling absent roles in their social interactions. We call this model the Role Fulfilling Model. This model aims to use role as a key concept to analyse the demands from the elderly for functionalities from an emotional perspective in artificial companion agent designs and technologies. To evaluate the effectiveness of this model, we proposed a serious game platform named Happily Aging in Place. This game will help us to involve a large scale of senior users through crowdsourcing to test our model and hypothesis. To improve the emotional communication between artificial companion agents and users, This book draft addresses an important but largely overlooked aspect of affective computing: how to enable companion agents to express mixed emotions with facial expressions? And furthermore, for different users, do individual heterogeneity affects the perception of the same facial expressions? Some preliminary results about gender differences have been found. The perception of facial expressions between different age groups or cultural backgrounds will be held in future study.
📄 Content
Abstract i
[Book Draft]
Emotional Interaction between Artificial Companion Agents and the Elderly
By
Yu Xinjia
Interdisciplinary Graduate School of the Nanyang Technological University Singapore
21 Jan 2016
Abstract ii
Abstract Artificial companion agents are defined as hardware or software entities designed to provide companionship to a person. The senior population are facing a special demand for companionship. Artificial companion agents have been demonstrated to be useful in therapy, offering emotional companionship and facilitating socialization. However, there is lack of empirical studies on what the artificial agents should do and how they can communicate with human beings better. To address these functional research problems, we attempt to establish a model to guide artificial companion designers to meet the emotional needs of the elderly through fulfilling absent roles in their social interactions. We call this model the Role Fulfilling Model. This model aims to use role as a key concept to analyse the demands from the elderly for functionalities from an emotional perspective in artificial companion agent designs and technologies. To evaluate the effectiveness of this model, we proposed a serious game platform named Happily Aging in Place. This game will help us to involve a large scale of senior users through crowdsourcing to test our model and hypothesis. To improve the emotional communication between artificial companion agents and users, this book draft addresses an important but largely overlooked aspect of affective computing: how to enable companion agents to express mixed emotions with facial expressions? And furthermore, for different users, do individual heterogeneity affects the perception of the same facial expressions? Some preliminary results about gender differences have been found. The perception of facial expressions between different age groups or cultural backgrounds will be held in future study. This book draft establishes a model to guide artificial companion agent designs based on individual emotional needs. And it also established the mapping between fixed emotion and facial expression of the artificial agents. These are the contributions of this book draft.
Acknowledgements iii
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincere thanks and gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Charles
Thomas Salmon, my co-supervisor Prof. Cyril Leung, and my mentor Assoc Prof. Miao
Chunyan. They guide and support me to find appropriate topic and methods of research. They
have shared their experience and spent their time on discussions that had inspired me to go
further in my area of interest.
I would like to thank my colleagues and friends at Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly (LILY) for the support on this book draft work. Their comments and constructive advice are instrumental to the development of this book draft.
Table of Contents iv
Table of Contents Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. ii Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………………………………………… iii Table of Contents ………………………………………………………………………………………………………. iv List of Figures ………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. vii List of Tables ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ix Chapter 1 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1 1.1 Background ………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 2 1.2Motivation …………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 2 1.2.1 To guide artificial companion agent design. ……………………………………………………. 3 1.2.3 Improve the quality of life for the elderly. ………………………………………………………. 3 1.3Methdology ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 4 1.3.1 Serious Games ……………………………………………………………………………………………. 4 1.3.2 Citizen science ……………………………………………………………………………………………. 4 1.4 Organization of the Report ………………………………………………………………………………. 5 Chapter 2 Literature Review …………………
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