NL

Expanding Narratives

Social robots can help improve the wellbeing of people with dementia. Either as assistants to healthcare workers in day centres, or as story tellers among clients and visiting family members. In the Expanding Narratives project, HKU works with healthcare institutes, artists and robot experts on the development of such narrative skills for robot, aspiring to enable meaningful interactions between robots and people with dementia.

Duration: March 2024 - 2027
The quality of life among elder people with dementia increases when they have longer and more frequent interactions. Studies confirm the importance of such positive and meaningful interactions. The reality in healthcare practice, however, is that understaffing often leaves little time for caregivers to offer such interactions. Their scarce time is necessarily spent on strictly functional interactions.

The robot as storyteller

One way to shape meaningful interactions is by telling stories to people who suffer from dementia, as a conversation starter. Social robots can be a means for creating more opportunity for such activities: the robot as storyteller. In the KIEM episodes of the project Robotstories, where this was tried out, positive effects of the use of social robots could indeed be observed. One of the healthcare partners said during the evaluation of the KIEM edition of Robotstories:

‘Our residents wanted to ‘help’ the robot. When it comes to meaningful interactions, I think this counts as such. They increased their ability to adapt. With human contact, our patients are always the one who is struggling. But the limitations of the robot allowed them to be the caring partner.’

Innovation in both healthcare and writing practices

Healthcare professionals regard social robots as a partial solution for the acute labour shortage. For example, by deploying them in the role of assistant or conversation starter in situations that allow for blended care. Simultaneously, speech writers for social robots see this interactive platform as a new medium for publishing their stories. One that can increase the impact of their stories and extend their reach towards a socially relevant domain. This demands new writing strategies and new artistic competencies from them.

Robots coming to life

The social robot becomes an actor, a story teller. This turns the meaningful interaction into a performative act. To bring the robot to life, and give it a soul, the suggestion of an inner mental world is important. If this is realised, the interaction can stay meaningful for a longer time, and the positive effect on people with dementia might endure longer as well.

Writers and theatre producers possess embodied knowledge about animating texts and objects in a theatre context. This is also applicable to social robots who act as story tellers. Social robots currently still lack the conversation skills to give shape to flexible and more long-form meaningful interactions. In particular for our target group: people with dementia.

Co-creative and transdisciplinary research

Still more research is required to be able to translate these narrative skills to the practice of everyday care for people with dementia in healthcare centres, and the possibilities for embedding social robots within this practice. The various disciplines can provide their expertise as input to fill some of the gaps within this research. Exactly this synthesis and iterative exchange of knowledge and experiences, within a co-creative and transdisciplinary project, can possibly lead to new methods for designing the narrator identity of the social robots, and eventually for an authoring tool that makes the development of stories for the storytelling robot more accessible for more participating writers.