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.

Group-based dance therapy can provide physical health, social and cognitive benefits for older adults, as well as promote mental health. In this article, we present a novel Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) study that explores how robot-facilitated group-based dance therapy sessions influence the affect, engagement, and enjoyment of a group of older adults interacting with a socially assistive robot. Furthermore, we investigate how robot embodiment size impacts group experiences during HRI. A human-size robot and a toy-size robot both facilitated group-based therapy sessions with older adults at a long-term care home over a 2-month period. Extensive results showed that robot dance therapy can effectively increase group valence and engagement through repeated interaction sessions, while maintaining high levels of group enjoyment. There were no statistically significant differences found in group affect, engagement, and enjoyment among these two different robot embodiment sizes.

As the global older population increases, more older adults need assistance in their daily lives. There is an increasing interest in using social robots to assist with everyday activities to promote overall wellbeing and health. However, whether and how social robot physical presence can influence human-robot interactions (HRI) with older adults has not yet been explored. In this paper, we present the first long-term HRI study conducted in a long-term care home that investigates the interaction behaviors of older adults during dance sessions facilitated by physically present and remotely present social human-like robots. Our results show that the older adults had similarly high levels of engagement and enjoyment during the interactions regardless of if the social robot was physically or remotely present. Although higher participation rates were observed in the in-person HRI, participation rates in the remote HRI were consistent to those in other non-robot facilitated physical activity interventions for older adults. Overall, this paper explores the role of robot presence and its impact on HRI, while providing insight into the potential use of remote HRI for providing social assistance to older adults.