Design and Evaluation of Proactive Behavior in Conversational Assistants: Approach with the Eva Companion Robot

The importance of providing emotional support and assistance to older adults has been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. An increasing number of older adults live alone, which promotes loneliness and depression risks. Also, the digital divide exacerbates these issues and other social difficulties, since older adults are not able to use technology to communicate. A socially assistive robot could help to address these loneliness and digital divide problems. However, it is critical to incorporate affectiveness and naturalness to promote the user acceptance of the robot. This project makes use of the existing EVA open-source robotics platform. The aim is to improve the quality of life of older adults by boosting their independence and alleviating loneliness or other emotional issues that can arise. To improve the user acceptance and to get a more natural, affective, non-passive behavior, this paper contributes to integrate several aspects to the EVA robot: a) assistiveness through conversations and a social messaging end-user skill to reduce the digital divide; b) proactivity by means of proactive interventions so EVA is able to start conversations; c) affectivity by means of showing emotions with eyes expressions, user recognition and emotion analysis in user input; and d) naturalness by blending all these characteristics with a low response time in the interaction and the novel wakeface activation method. Finally, a technical evaluation of the proposed solution provides evidence of its appropriate performance.