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Social isolation is one of the most common consequences of older people with dementia, especially for those who live at their own dwellings alone due to limited access to social activities. Research relating to the use of social robots in aged care has increasing attention to facilitating the support to care services for older people with dementia. Particularly less attention has focused on the applicability of social robots in home care services. This paper aims to study the engagement and robot experience of older people with dementia while interacting with a social robot named Betty in the context of home-based care. This paper contributes to the research relating to care service embedded robots by expanding the knowledge regarding longitudinal research in home based care, while there is limited long-term study in this context. The results show that social robots are evident to be able to engage with older people with dementia at home. Consequently, designing social robots in a social context is desirable. While the robots enabled service for the human partner within the social context is possible, there is a need to underpin the concept of personhood to realize personalization of services and its contents to suit individual preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Difficulties living in unfamiliar cultures are caused by differences in patterns of thinking, points of view, and physical action styles. Learning to understand these different styles is one solution that may help people to live together with their differences. This paper presents our findings on learners' cultural understanding during interaction based on culturally influenced communication in simulated crowds. Japanese and Thai participants were asked to obtain multiple tickets available at two service counters, A and B, in a shared virtual space, where a service person provided a ticket upon request. Virtual customers moved around in the system to acquire tickets and, if a counter was occupied by a customer, other customers had to wait. Two types of waiting styles (line and group) and two service person fairness levels (fair and unfair) were configured and the reactions of participants evaluated. Furthermore, the counter selection results and selection reasoning results were analysed using the ANOVA process. The results showed that culture influences ideas of waiting differently between Japanese and Thai participants: Japanese participants focused on the benefits of waiting, such as waiting speed, whereas Thai participants focused on the reaction or response of the service person to customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows a novel eye gaze tracking (EGT) technique using thecorneal imaging technique. Compared to the existing pupil center and pupil reflection techniques, our approach directly finds PoG in the reflected scene image at the human corneal surface. As a result, it does not suffer from the parallax issue and does not require per-setup system calibrations. To achieve this system, we develop following techniques: First, we use the idea of the gaze-reflection point (GRP), where light from the PoG in the scene reflects at the corneal surface into an eye image. Second, illuminating the whole scene or particular objects using coded structured light enables robust and accurate matching at the GRP to obtain the PoG in a scene image. For this purpose, we show two implementations: a special high-power IR LED-array projector and active LED markers. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed scheme achieves considerable accuracy and successfully supports depth-varying environments as well as practical applications including observation in a conversation scene. We believe the proposed EGT technique has considerably large potential to solve major issues of current EGT systems, expands the application fields of the EGT and increases the usability of interactive systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents a study which proposed an architecture for a cognitive robot based on tactile and visual information. Overview of the cognitive robot architecture; Results; Discussion and conclusion.