Towards emotionally aligned social robots for dementia: perspectives of care partners and persons with dementia

Persons living with dementia and their care partners place a high value on aging in place and maintaining independence. Socially assistive robots – embodied characters or pets that provide companionship and aid through social interaction – are a promising tool to support these goals. There is a growing commercial market for these devices, with functions including medication reminders, conversation, pet‐like behaviours, and even the collection of health data. While potential users generally report positive feelings towards social robots, persons with dementia have been under‐included in design and development, leading to a disconnect between robot functions and the real‐world needs and desires of end‐users. Furthermore, a key element of social and emotional connectedness in human relationships is emotional alignment – a state where all partners have congruent emotional understandings of a situation. Strong emotional alignment between users and robots will be necessary for social robots to provide meaningful companionship, but a computational model of how to achieve this has been absent from the field. To this end, we propose and test Affect Control Theory (ACT) as a framework to improve emotional alignment between older adults and social robotics.