Junya Nakanishi

While more and more robots have been employed in the service industry, the impact of the human--robot social interaction on a heartwarming interaction service mostly remains an open question. For the purpose of exploring the possibility that a humanoid robot engages in a heartwarming interaction service, we developed herein the first prototype of the service system through a humanoid robot and conducted a field study, where a humanoid robot engages in the service for a customer at a hotel to col

We propose a huggable communication device called Hugvie that encourages children to concentrate on listening by reducing their stress and strengthening the feeling that the storyteller is close. We observed a group of preschool children who listened to a story and conclude that Hugvie has the potential to facilitate attention on stories. This indicates its usefulness to relieve the educational problem where children show disobedient or restless behavior during class. We discuss Hugvie's effect

In this paper, we propose the introduction of human-like communication media as a proxy for teachers to support the listening of children in school education. Three case studies are presented on storytime fieldwork for children using our huggable communication medium called Hugvie, through which children are encouraged to concentrate on listening by intimate interaction between children and storytellers. We investigate the effect of Hugvie on children's listening and how they and their teachers

Under the circumstances that social robots are increasingly being developed and studied in service encounters at public spaces, are they introduced into residential environments (i.e., private space)? This study hypothesizes that a personal assistant device in residential environments should wear human-like appearance to engage in service as conversation partner. We implemented the interaction design that provides regular services as the current personal assistant and additional service as conve

Robot-mediated interaction may be one of the best approaches to overcome the implementation-related limitations of face-to-face interaction between children and older adults. However, there has been little research about development or demonstration of teleoperated social robot systems that could be implemented in nurseries. We report a preliminary experiment wherein older adults greet nursery pupils on their way to and from school using a teleoperated social robot. The results suggest that usin

This study examines the possible services a social robot can provide in a hotel room. This area of research falls under the relatively unexplored domain of social robot services. This paper proposes and tests the proactive services rendered by a soliloquising social robot that has three core functions: responding to a customer's request, soliloquising about the hotel service, and proactively expressing goodwill (e.g. greetings and farewells), according to the context. We expect that, through its

To explore the interaction design of an autonomous social robot stationed in a hotel room, we conducted a Wizard of Oz study. We developed a teleoperated robotic system that appears to move autonomously through voice-to-synthesis processing. Comparing the evaluation of the latest autonomous case with one of these teleoperated cases, the results show that it is possible to construct a robotic system that is more highly rated in terms of warmth, competence, and enjoyment of conversation. The resul

Direct interpersonal touch affects the recipients' impression of the touch providers and information related to them. However, the applicability of this fact in mediated interpersonal touch remains unclear. In this study, we describe the alleviating effect of mediated interpersonal touch on social judgment and show that mediated hugs with a remote person affect the impression of the hearsay information about a third person. In our experiment, participants rated their impressions via a questionna

As social robots are being increasingly employed in service encounters, effective interactive design should be considered. This paper focused on heartwarming interaction for hospitality, and explored an impact of a kind of robot's behavior, perceived cuteness of a robot, and users' personality on the interactions. The experimental results identified key factors which affects impression of heartwarming interaction.

Although it is perceivable that interpersonal touch affects recipient's impression of touch provider as well as the information relating to the provider alike, its utility in touch mediated through communication devices (virtual interpersonal touch) remains unclear to date. In this article, we report the alleviating effect of virtual interpersonal touch on social judgment. In particular, we show that virtual hug with a remote person modulates the impression of the hearsay information about an ab

This pilot study reports an experiment where we introduced huggable communication media into daytime sleep in co-sleeping situation. The purpose of the experiment was to investigate whether it would improve soothing child users' sleep and how hugging experience with anthropomorphic communication media affects child's anthropomorphic impression on the media in co-sleeping. In the experiment, nursery teachers read two-year-old or five-year-old children to sleep through huggable communication media