How Should a Social Mediator Robot Convey Messages About the Self-Disclosures of Elderly People to Recipients?

Encouraging the self-disclosure of the elderly is important for preventing their social isolation. In this article, we discuss a use case in which social robots are employed to mediate remote communication between elderly individuals and their family members or friends. This research aims to elaborate design guidelines for social mediator robots concerning how robots should convey messages from elderly individuals to their recipients. We particularly considered human–robot interactions in which elderly individuals can choose the robot’s behavior (i.e., messaging options) based on their preference. If the robot is implemented with effective messaging options, the elderly’s anxiety about self-disclosing information they usually feel reluctant to share with others (e.g., loss experiences) may be mitigated. An online survey of 589 elderly participants showed that the messaging options for the mediator robot should be designed in three types: requesting-support, concealing, and recording. The study results also suggest that each of the messaging options should be chosen according to the relationships between the factors of recipients, disclosers’ personal characteristics, and dialog topics. Furthermore, an empirical human–robot interaction study conducted with 36 elderly participants suggested that the anxiety of elderly disclosers was significantly lower when they could apply their preferable messaging options to self-disclosure than the case when the robot did not provide any messaging options to them. Thus, the effectiveness of the messaging options designed through this study was demonstrated.