Spill the Tea: When Robot Conversation Agents Support Well-being for Older Adults

Robots could support older adults' well-being by engaging them in meaningful conversations, specifically to reflect on, support, and improve different aspects of their well-being. We implemented a system on a QT social robot to conduct short autonomous conversations with older adults, to help understand what brings them feelings of joy and meaning in life. We evaluated the system with written surveys and observations of 12 participants including older adults, caregivers, and dementia care staff. From this, we saw the need to improve user experience through personalized interaction that better support older adults as they talk about well-being. Improving the interactions will involve improving the conversation flow, detecting emotions and nonverbal cues, and natural language processing to extract topics around well-being.