Insights on usability and user feedback for an assistive robotic health companion with adaptive linguistic style

Socially assistive robots help the human in everyday tasks. In particular, they can also provide assistance with regard to health and wellbeing, which is an important opportunity to support the independence of the elderly. Since spoken language often carries the essential information, the robot's verbal communication style is of special interest. In order to explore individual user's preferences with regard to the robot's linguistic style we built an autonomous, assistive health companion. It is operated with a custom hardware control panel and offers games, jokes, health-related recommendations, applications for information retrieval and communication. This paper reports on insights from the in-situ user study with regard to the system's usability and participants' feedback.