Fostering Emotional Engagement and Sustained Interaction in Care Homes Through Empathetic Human–Robot Conversation
TL;DR
These findings provide early field evidence that autonomous, LLM-driven conversational robots can maintain emotionally supportive dialogue with older adults, fostering emotional engagement, trust and sustained interaction over time, mechanisms that may contribute to reducing perceived social isolation.
Abstract
Social isolation is a critical health concern for older adults—especially in institutional care, where limited social interaction is linked with depression, cognitive decline and poorer physical health. Empathetic human–robot interaction offers a promising avenue to address these emotional and mental health challenges. We report on a two-stage evaluation of an LLM-powered social robot designed to support emotionally attuned conversations with older adults. In a lab study ( \(N=40\) ), the robot achieved high scores on four empathy-related measures. We then deployed a fully autonomous system for 10 weeks in a residential care home (five residents; up to 45 minutes per session). Across repeated interactions, participants showed sustained engagement and predominantly mid-depth self-disclosure, alongside affective trust and occasional cognitive trust. Exploratory analyses indicated that higher empathic appropriateness co-occurred with deeper disclosure and increased over sessions for most participants. To our knowledge, these findings provide early field evidence that autonomous, LLM-driven conversational robots can maintain emotionally supportive dialogue with older adults, fostering emotional engagement, trust and sustained interaction over time, mechanisms that may contribute to reducing perceived social isolation.