A Robot Presenting Reproduced Stories among Older Adults in Group Conversation

Group conversation, one form of social activities, plays main roles to train and rehabilitate cognitive function as well as improve emotional states in older adults. It has been mainly utilized for healthy older adults. This paper proposes a robot that warms up group conversations of older adults by reusing or repeating speech statements, which are played successfully to activate group conversations of older adults previously. A novel group conversation technique called the "coimagination" method for preventing mild cognitive impairments and dementia, was used for collecting and reusing conversation data. Two types of group conversation experiments were conducted among older adults. 1) All participants who were human in coimagination sessions, present their original stories with pictures according to selected topic. 2) One of participants in coimagination sessions was a robot, which presents the reproduced interesting stories. These reproduced stories were collected and implemented into the robot in advance. We analyzed the data by the frequency of evoked laughter in each topic and in all participants. The reproduced stories presented by the robot created more laughter than the original stories presented by human. The robot successfully elicited more laughter than the human participants. Based on these results, we found that the robot successfully enlivened group conversation through evoking laughter.