title: Effectiveness of social behaviors for autonomous wheelchair robot to support elderly people in Japan.
abstract: We developed a wheelchair robot to support the movement of elderly people and specifically implemented two functions to enhance their intention to use it: speaking behavior to convey place/location related information and speed adjustment based on individual preferences. Our study examines how the evaluations of our wheelchair robot differ when compared with human caregivers and a conventional autonomous wheelchair without the two proposed functions in a moving support context. 28 senior citizens participated in the experiment to evaluate three different conditions. Our measurements consisted of questionnaire items and the coding of free-style interview results. Our experimental results revealed that elderly people evaluated our wheelchair robot higher than the wheelchair without the two functions and the human caregivers for some items.
authors.affiliation: Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, ATR, Kyoto, Japan.
authors.forename: Masahiro
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Shiomi
authors.affiliation: Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, ATR, Kyoto, Japan.
authors.forename: Takamasa
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Iio
authors.affiliation: Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, ATR, Kyoto, Japan.
authors.forename: Koji
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kamei
authors.affiliation: Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, ATR, Kyoto, Japan.
authors.forename: Chandraprakash
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Sharma
authors.affiliation: Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, ATR, Kyoto, Japan.
authors.forename: Norihiro
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Hagita
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D008297:Male; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012371:Robotics; D012919:Social Behavior; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014910:Wheelchairs