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Cognitive Intervention Through Photo-Integrated Conversation Moderated by Robots (PICMOR) Program: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

ABSTRACT: Social interaction might prevent or delay dementia, but little is known about the specific effects of various social activity interventions on cognition. This study conducted a single-site randomized controlled trial (RCT) of Photo-Integrated Conversation Moderated by Robots (PICMOR), a group conversation intervention program for resilience against cognitive decline and dementia. In the RCT, PICMOR was compared to an unstructured group conversation condition. Sixty-five community-living older adults participated in this study. The intervention was provided once a week for 12 weeks. Primary outcome measures were the cognitive functions; process outcome measures included the linguistic characteristics of speech to estimate interaction quality. Baseline and post-intervention data were collected. PICMOR contains two key features: 1) photos taken by the participants are displayed and discussed sequentially; and 2) a robotic moderator manages turn-taking to make sure that participants are allocated the same amount of time. Among the primary outcome measures, one of the subcategories of cognitive functions, verbal fluency significantly improved in the intervention group. Among the process outcome measures, a part of the subcategories of linguistic characteristics of speech, the amount of speech and richness of words, proportion of providing topics, questions, and answers in total utterances were larger for the intervention group. This study demonstrated for the first time the positive effects of a robotic social activity intervention on cognitive function in healthy older adults via RCT. The group conversation generated by PICMOR may improve participants' verbal fluency since participants have more opportunity to provide their own topics, asking and answering questions which results in exploring larger vocabularies. PICMOR is available and accessible to community-living older adults. Clinical Trial Registration: UMIN Clinical Trials Registry, identifier UMIN000036667.

SUBMITTER: Otake-Matsuura M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8103544 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:The influence of human-care service robots in human-robot interaction is becoming of great importance, because of the roles that the robots are taking in today's and future society. Thus, we need to identify how humans can interact, collaborate, and learn from social robots more efficiently. Additionally, it is important to determine the robots' modalities that can increase the humans' perceived likeness and knowledge acquisition and enhance human-robot collaboration. The present study aims to identify the optimal social service robots' modalities that enhance the human learning process and level of enjoyment from the interaction and even attract the humans' attention to choosing a robot to collaborate with it. Our target group was college students, pre-service teachers. For this purpose, we designed two experiments, each one split in two parts. Both the experiments were between groups, and human participants had the chance to watch the Nao robot performing a storytelling exercise about the history of robots in a museum-educational activity via video annotations. The robot's modalities were manipulated on its body movements (expressive arm and head gestures) while performing the storytelling, friendly attitude expressions and storytelling, and personality traits. After the robot's storytelling, participants filled out a knowledge acquisition questionnaire and a self-reported enjoyment level questionnaire. In the second part, we introduce the idea of participants witnessing a conversation between the robots with the different modalities, and they were asked to choose the robot with which they want to collaborate in a similar activity. Results indicated that participants prefer to collaborate with robots with a cheerful personality and expressive body movements. Especially when they were asked to choose between two robots that were cheerful and had expressive body movements, they preferred the one which originally told them the story. Moreover, participants did not prefer to collaborate with a robot with an extremely friendly attitude and storytelling style.

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Cognitive Intervention Through Photo-Integrated Conversation Moderated by Robots (PICMOR) Program: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

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