Human- or Robot-like Music Assistive Robots: Effects on Fluency and Memory Recall

Longer lifespans and an ageing population put tremendous pressure on the care of the elderly. With the technology of robotics breakthroughs, it appears that the use of robotics in elderly care is ready to take off. Interestingly, more and more robots are now being created with a human-like appearance and demeanour, yet this could lead to issues like inappropriate mental models of robots in the user's mind. On the other hand, due to their minimal communication challenges, robot-like robots may function effectively in the human-robot interaction. Up to now, far too little attention has been paid to the increasing trend of the human-like robot. This thesis compared the performance of these two types of robots, which may help to explain why the trend is the way it is. Two research questions are created to accomplish this goal: Which type of robot, robot-like or human-like, produces the most fluent interaction in the elderly care scenario? Does the robot-like or human-like robot bring about the best memory performance in the music listening activity?This thesis project aims to contribute to the development of the social robot in elderly care. In this thesis, a music assistance robot was developed, it can converse with the user while listening to music and recalling memories associated with the song. The elder's health and well being are benefited by this pastime. To address the question of which type of robot performs better, two types of robots, a human-like robot and a robot-like robot, were created to compare in terms of fluency in human-robot interactions and performance of memory recall during music listening activities. Four key elements: appearance, behaviour, voice and dialogue were used in the construction of two robot identities. Based on the robot we created, a joint music listening experiment was carried out. For evaluation, a questionnaire and video recordings of the interaction were both employed. This was tested with 30 volunteers (The young adults were chosen for the experiment due to COVID restrictions and time limitation), and it was discovered that the human-like robot performed better overall.Computer Scienc