Promoting cognitive health in elder care with large language model-powered socially assistive robots
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
As the global population ages, there is increasing need for accessible technologies that promote cognitive health and detect early signs of cognitive decline. This research demonstrates the potential for in-residence monitoring and assessment of cognitive health using large language model (LLM)-powered socially assistive robots (SARs). We conducted a 5-week within-subjects study involving 22 older adults in retirement homes to investigate the feasibility of large language model (LLM)-powered socially assistive robots (SARs) for promoting and assessing cognitive health. We designed tasks that involved verbal dialogue based on clinically validated cognitive tools. Our findings reveal improved task performance after three robot-administered sessions, with significantly more detailed picture descriptions, fewer word repetitions in semantic fluency, and reduced need for hints. We found that older adults were more socially engaged in robot-administered tasks compared to those administered by a human, and they accepted and were willing to engage with socially assistive robots (SARs) in this context, which had not been tested before.
Date Issued
2025-04-25
Date Acceptance
2025-04-01
Citation
Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2025, pp.1-22
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Start Page
1
End Page
22
Journal / Book Title
Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
License URL
Identifier
10.1145/3706598.3713582
Source
2025 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems-CHI
Subjects
ACCEPTANCE
cognitive health
Computer Science
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science, Information Systems
Computer Science, Theory & Methods
elder care
HOME
large language models
OLDER-ADULTS
PEOPLE
Robotics
Science & Technology
socially assistive robotics
Technology
VERBAL FLUENCY
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2025-04-26
Finish Date
2025-05-01
Coverage Spatial
Yokohama, Japan
Date Publish Online
2025-04-25