A semantic approach to outline anthropomorphic characteristics for a robot caregiver

During the last few years, due to the ageing 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 artefacts 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 elderly people over 65 on the acceptability and the likeness features a caregiver robot must have. Starting from a classification of 25 different real robot pictures and the associated questionnaire on the quality of eighteen adjectives describing the first and the last robot selected, our work tried, using a linguistic-hermeneutic approach, to better understand the hidden and implicit motivations that lead to the acceptance or the rejection of a robot and found some interesting results for appealing or unpleasant features for caregiver robot design.