Social Robots with Gamification Principles to Increase Long-Term User Interaction

Social robots hold significant promise to help individuals achieve their goals. Most individuals can benefit from a social robot when they interact with it over multiple sessions or a prolonged period. However, this can run well beyond the initial novelty period with a robot, signifying a challenging area for sustainable long-term user interest and engagement. Gamification is a key domain that holds promise to overcome uptake and retention concerns. Grounded in gamification theory in combination with the 'Computers As Social Actors' (CASA) paradigm, this paper presents a set of guidelines for recommended practice on creating and implementing social robot interactions for long-term human-robot interactions.