EFFECT PERSONALITY MATCHING ON ROBOT ACCEPTANCE 1 Effect of Robot-User Personality Matching on the Acceptance of Domestic Assistant Robots for Elderly

Lack of acceptance of social assistive robots by elderly could obstruct this technology to bridge the gap between demand and supply of elderly care. Two experiments were conducted with 22 older adults (63 to 87 years old) in a home-like room of the Experience-Lab of Philips. The aim of the first experiment was to test the effect of user-robot personality matching on the acceptance by elderly of a robot that provides agenda and medication reminders. The second experiment explored the mechanism behind robot personality preferences. The results of the first experiment show that the perceived sociability was significantly higher for the extravert robot compared to the introvert robot(p<.05). Sociability is the most prominent characteristic of extraverted people (Tapus & Matari, 2008). Therefore, we concluded that the designed personalities were recognized. In line with previous studies we found that the feeling of social presence (p<.05) and the perceived enjoyability (p<.01) were higher for the extravert robot compared to the introvert robot. Contrary to our expectations, results indicated marginally significant more anxiety for the robot with a similar extraversion level compared to a robot with a complementary extraversion level. On the other hand, the results of our second experiment indicate that similarity attraction influenced the preferred personality of participants. The reasons that participants provided for their robot personality preference suggest that the role that participants believe the robot should have (e.g. a companion or a service oriented machine) and the appreciation of expressed self-confidence influenced their robot personality preferences. The appreciation of expressed self-confidence seems to be related to similarity attraction. EFFECT PERSONALITY MATCHING ON ROBOT ACCEPTANCE 3 Table of