Introducing Artificial Commensal Companions

The term commensality refers to "sharing food and eating together in a social group. In this paper, we hypothesize that it would be possible to have the same kind of experience in a HCI setting, thanks to a new type of interface that we call Artificial Commensal Companion (ACC), that would be beneficial, for example, to people who voluntarily choose or are constrained to eat alone. To this aim, we introduce an interactive system implementing an ACC in the form of a robot with non-verbal socio-affective capabilities. Future tests are already planned to evaluate its influence on the eating experience of human participants.