Living Each Day with Intention: Social Robot for Promoting Self-Reflection in Older Adults
Social robots are unique as persuasive agents due to their embodiment, which increases their capacity to promote behavioral and motivational change [3],[4]. We therefore designed an interaction between a humanoid social desktop robot — QT (Fig. 1) — and older adults aimed at promoting positive life changes through guided self-reflective exercises. We focus on older adults as while much work has focused on using robots with this population to ameliorate loneliness and depressive symptoms through interactions with the technology (e.g., [2]), few studies have focused on using robots to increase feelings of fulfillment, value, and meaning in helping older adults thrive (and not just cope). However, research done with college students shows that robots can be used in positive psychology interventions to increase flourishing [1].