Development of RobotHub: Integration of external system to group conversation system for older adults
S. Tokunaga, K. Fukumori, K. Tamura, K. Inoue, T. Kawahara, M. Otake-Matsuura
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AbstractTowards an aging society, there becomes much more critical to conduct social activities such as conversations for older adults to keep their cognitive function in their lives (Livingstone et al. 2017). Along with this social background, our research group has conducted a group conversation experiment for older adults to verify cognitive training with a randomized controlled trial (Otake-Matsuura et al., 2021). The group conversation method is called Coimagination method, which is designed to have a talk in a well-balanced manner with a specialized system (named Fonopane) and moderator robot Bono-05. Because of the COVID-19 situation, those face-to-face experiments have become challenging to conduct. Therefore, we need to extend system to overcome the above physical limitations by interfacing the system to a teleconferencing system such as Zoom. Active listening function is desirable in such a system, since active listening is an essential factor in addressing smooth conversation for older adults and providing rich human-computer interaction (Inoue et al., 2020). In general, integration of different systems has some technical challenges, such as different communication protocols. In addition, the existing active listening system has developed focusing a one-to-one style with humans and AI; hence, there are technical problems for integrating such a one-to-one style system into a multi-party group conversation system. In this paper, as a first step, we integrate system to encourage new fashion to facilitate group conversation for older adults with remote.Keywords: group moderated robot, robots, home-based experiments
S. Tokunaga, K. Fukumori, K. Tamura, K. Inoue, T. Kawahara, M. Otake-Matsuura (2022). Development of RobotHub: Integration of external system to group conversation system for older adults. Gerontechnology, 21(s),1-1
https://doi.org/10.4017/gt.2022.21.s.510.opp4