The robot Tangy facilitating Trivia games: A team-based user-study with long-term care residents

Abstract

Robot facilitated cognitive interventions for older adults have mainly focused on one-on-one interactions or with groups of people each individually playing. In this paper, we present the design of the socially assistive robot, Tangy, for autonomously facilitating the team-based cognitively stimulating activity of Trivia with older adults which encourages users to interact with each other. A pilot study at a local long-term care facility with older adult residents demonstrated that Tangy could successfully facilitate Trivia games. In general, the participants were engaged in the activity, complied with the robot's requests, and had positive attitudes towards Tangy during the games. The Trivia game scenario also promoted cooperation and interactions between teammates. Furthermore, we compared the results in this study with the results of our previous study on the individually played game of Bingo. The comparison results showed that participants complied with the robot and were engaged during both activities, however, the team-based Trivia had higher levels of engagement and player interaction.