Addressing the Long-Term Evaluation of a Telepresence Robot for the Elderly

This paper presents aspects of an ongoing work for a long-term evaluation of a telepresence robot named GIRAFF, as a tool for facilitating interaction and support delivery to older people living at home. Most robotic systems are usually used for short periods of time and in laboratory settings, while this paper describes the challenges, both technological and related to the user evaluation that human-robot interaction should addressed in view of a real use of the technology for a long time span outside the laboratory. The work describes our experience in developing testing sites and in designing an evaluation plan to assess the potential of the GIRAFF platform for telepresence. We highlight open points related to the transition from a limited use in time (short term) to a significant period of time (long term). From a human-robot interaction perspective, we first introduce some results from the short term evaluation, obtained by interviewing 26 nurses as possible clients (people connecting to the robot) and 10 older adults as possible end users (people receiving visits through the robot). The paper describes then a complete evaluation plan designed for the long term assessment. From a technological point of view a set of mandatory "intelligent features" are taken into account that could enable a better real world deployment by inheriting capabilities form state-of-the-art autonomous intelligent robots.