Prototyping a Zoomorphic Interactive Robot Companion with Emotion Recognition and Affective Voice Interaction for Elderly People

Abstract

An aging society paired with a skilled labor shortage, particularly in European countries, requires a rethinking of deprecated structures. Intelligent assistive technologies, specifically socially assistive robots, addressing the gap between caretakers and elderly people in need of care have moved into the focus of debate due to their potentials to reduce costs, improve independence, and eventually raise quality of life. In this work, we outline the potentials of zoomorphic robot companions combining intelligent conversational abilities and emotion recognition. We then describe the prototyping of an emotion-sensing zoomorphic interactive robot companion including the development and implementation of a multimodal emotion recognition framework. This framework uses speech emotion recognition, sentiment analysis, and affective voice interaction based on a large language model. The prototyping has been accompanied by two studies on elderly peoples' design preferences regarding the proposed feature set as well as different embodiments to find the appropriate casing for the robot companion. This work provides valuable insights into the prototyping and can thus support future research endeavors in this area.