SAR-Connect: A Socially Assistive Robotic System to Support Activity and Social Engagement of Older Adults

Multidomain activities that incorporate physical, cognitive, and social stimuli can enhance older adults' overall health and quality of life. Several robotic platforms have been developed to provide these therapies in a quantifiable manner to complement healthcare personnel in resource-strapped long-term care settings. However, these platforms are primarily limited to one-to-one human-robot interaction (HRI) and thus do not enhance social interaction. In this article, we present a novel HRI framework and a realized platform called socially assistive robotic (SAR)-Connect to foster robot-mediated social interaction among older adults through carefully designed tasks that also incorporate physical and cognitive stimuli. SAR-Connect seamlessly integrates a humanoid robot with a virtual reality-based activity platform and a multimodal data acquisition module including game interaction, audio, visual, and electroencephalography responses of the participants. Results from a laboratory-based user study with older adults indicates the potential of SAR-Connect that showed this system could 1) involve one or multiple older adults to perform multidomain activities and provide dynamic guidance, 2) engage them in the robot-mediated task and foster human-human interaction, and 3) quantify their social and activity engagement from multiple sensory modalities.