Dances with Social Robots: A Pilot Study at Long-Term Care

Dance therapy can have significant physical, emotional and cognitive benefits for older adults. In particular, social robots can be developed to autonomously facilitate dance sessions to engage these individuals with the aim of improving quality of life. To successfully integrate and promote long-term use of social robots into long-term care homes for such recreational activities, it is important to explore both residents’ and staff’s perceptions of such robots. In this paper, we present the first pilot human–robot interaction study that investigates the overall experiences and attitudes of both residents and staff in a long-term care home for robot-facilitated dance sessions. In general, the questionnaire results from our study showed that both staff and residents had positive attitudes towards the robot-facilitated dance activity. Encouraging trends showed residents had higher ratings for statements on perceived ease of use, safety, and enjoyment than the staff. However, the staff had a statistically significantly higher rating for willingness to use the robots for dance facilitation. Some key statistical differences were also determined with respect to: (1) gender within the resident group (men had higher ratings for the robots being useful in helping facilitate recreational activities), as well as between staff and residents (resident men had higher perceived safety), and (2) prior robot experience (residents with limited prior experience had higher ratings on perceived ease of use and perceived enjoyment than staff with the same level of experience). The robot-facilitated dance activity was positively received by both older adults and staff as an activity of daily living that can enhance wellbeing while also being safe, easy to use and enjoyable.