Can robots help tackle loneliness?
Dr Dave Cameron
It was announced this week that Robots to be used in UK care homes to help reduce loneliness. Dr Dave Cameron gives his thoughts on robots tackling loneliness.
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| Photo by Alex Knight from Pexels |
What do you make of “companion robots”? Do you think they really could be the solution for curing loneliness in old age?
Companion robots have a real potential as a research tool to better understand how people interact with each other and how social interactions progress. Their use in supporting people who are lonely is admirable but a lot of the ground work still needs to be done.
I don’t think loneliness in old age could be solved just by using companionship robots. Companion robots may help though: they can provide entertainment, comfort, or distraction from loneliness, similar to other media, but not tackle the issue itself. They can offer a simulation of a relationship but that experience may be closer to the social connection felt when listening to a podcast or watching TV than any real attachment.
Are there any issues with companion robots at the moment which will need to be surmounted before we see widespread adoption?
The technology that supports social robots is still expensive and in early development. Social robots work well in prepared scenarios, where people have limited options for interaction, but face difficulties in more open-ended situations. The social interactions that are more meaningful to us tend to be open-ended ones — robots aren’t developed enough to either interpret the situation or adequately respond yet.
In studies and interaction scenarios we create at Sheffield Robotics, we’ve noticed that people treat a humanoid quite differently from animal-like social robots. They may expect more from the humanoid and lose interest when it doesn’t behave in particularly social or complex ways but for animal-like robots people can be quite content with it behaving in a very docile way.
Before widespread adoption, we may need to drastically improve capabilities, while keeping costs down, or be more realistic in what sort of social roles a robot could currently fill — such as a simulated pet.
Is there any research to suggest that companion robots actually work to reduce feels of loneliness?
This topic is still quite new and much of the work is exploratory. The more established work considers animal-like robots used in animal-assisted therapy scenarios and tends to show decreases in feelings of loneliness. (This paper’s a good review of some recent work with social robots). More work needs to be done comparing different interventions to support lonely people to better understand if introducing companion robots has a unique benefit.
Do you envisage a future where human companionship is totally side-lined in favour of robots?
I wouldn’t expect the introduction of robots themselves to be what side-lines human companionship. If it were to occur, it would simply be part of the wider issues faced in our society of the ongoing commodification of human interaction. Some essential social roles, such as care for the elderly and particularly the social interactions that this entails, don’t necessarily generate profit and so get marginalized. Rather than exploring whether social companionship can be automated, we should ask why do we insufficiently support people in caring roles?
Dr Dave Cameron is a Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction at @InfoSchoolSheff & social psychologist at @ShefRobotics. The original version of this blog is available here.
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