A study of elderly people's emotional understanding of prompts given by Virtual Humans

This paper presents a study conducted to understand how facial expressions in audio-visual prompts given by virtual humans are understood by elderly people on an emotional level with an aim to design emotionally aligned prompts for persons with cognitive disabilities who often need assistance from a caregiver to complete daily living activities such as washing hands, making food, or getting dressed. Artificially intelligent systems have been developed that can assist in such situations. Our long term aim is to enhance such systems by delivering automated prompts that are emotionally aligned with individuals in order to have better human-system interaction in helping with the tasks. This paper presents a set of prompts of male and female virtual humans with a focus on their facial expressions. A user study with elderly persons was conducted with respect to three basic and important dimensions of emotional experience: Evaluation, Potency, and Activity (EPA). Results show that there is significant consensus on E and P dimensions, and some consensus on the A dimension.