The ACCEPTABILITY of Caregiver Robots in Elderly People.

During the last few years, due to the aging of the population, many scientists have developed ICT tools to offer elderly people an independent life at home as long as possible. Most of these researchers focused their efforts on problem solving without adequate care to the agreeability and/or the acceptability of these ICT objects for their users. These resulting artifacts will hardly be used in real life by the users for which they have been developed. In this paper, we will present an experiment done on 202 over 65 elderly people on the acceptability and the likeness features a caregiver robot must have. From the classification and analysis of the emotions elicited by the physical/appearance characteristics of 25 different real robot pictures we found some interesting results for appealing or unpleasant features for caregiver robot design.