Do elderly people prefer a conversational humanoid as a shopping assistant partner in supermarkets?

Assistive robots can be perceived in two main ways: tools or partners. In past research, assistive robots that offer physical assistance for the elderly are often designed in the context of a tool metaphor. This paper investigates the effect of two design considerations for assistive robots in a partner metaphor: conversation and robot-type. The former factor is concerned with whether robots should converse with people even if the conversation is not germane for completing the task. The latter factor is concerned with whether people prefer a communication/function oriented design for assistive robots. To test these design considerations, we selected a shopping assistance situation where a robot carries a shopping basket for elderly people, which is one typical scenario used for assistive robots. A field experiment was conducted in a real supermarket in Japan where 24 elderly participants shopped with robots. The experimental results revealed that they prefer a conversational humanoid as a shopping assistant partner.