“Carrier-pigeon Robot: Promoting Interactions Among Older Adults in a Care Home”, the late-breaking work of Hugo Simão, David Gonçalves, Ana Pires, and Tiago Guerreiro, LASIGE researchers, won a Best Paper Award at ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction.

In this work, the authors explore a robot as a communication vehicle for older adults in care homes. They extend older people’s actions and increase their communication through a robot traveling across the institution. This robot is programmable by older people using 3D printed, tangible blocks with default actions to build sequences. This way, people are in charge of the interaction. Besides the improvement in communication for the general people institutionalized, the technique showed to be promising for people with mobility impairments to extend their action range. The HRI Proceedings and videos are fully available online.

Checkout the video and the paper.