Design strategies for empathetic AI robots for older adults

Abstract:Emulating empathy in human-robot interaction is a key component for achieving satisfying social, trustworthy, and ethical robot interaction with older people. Following comments from older adult study participants, the article uses humanities methods to identify a gap in defining empathetic robot care activities. It provides a design focus to mitigate it. Current human-robot designs, to a certain extent, neglect to include empathy as a theorized design pathway. Using one digital humanities research collection on humanoid robots, it contributes an empathetic care vocabulary as a design pathway for a productive underlying foundation for designing Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) that aim to support older people's goals of aging-in-place. Using rhetorical theory, this paper defines the socio-cultural expectations for convincing empathetic relationships.

Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2510.01192 [cs.HC]

(or arXiv:2510.01192v2 [cs.HC] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.01192 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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