The face of trust: The effect of robot face ratio on consumer preference

When Trustworthiness Meets Face: Facial Design for Social Robots

As a technical application in artificial intelligence, a social robot is one of the branches of robotic studies that emphasizes socially communicating and interacting with human beings. Although both robot and behavior research have realized the significance of social robot design for its market success and related emotional benefit to users, the specific design of the eye and mouth shape of a social robot in eliciting trustworthiness has received only limited attention. In order to address this research gap, our study conducted a 2 (eye shape) × 3 (mouth shape) full factorial between-subject experiment. A total of 211 participants were recruited and randomly assigned to the six scenarios in the study. After exposure to the stimuli, perceived trustworthiness and robot attitude were measured accordingly. The results showed that round eyes (vs. narrow eyes) and an upturned-shape mouth or neutral mouth (vs. downturned-shape mouth) for social robots could significantly improve people's trustworthiness and attitude towards social robots. The effect of eye and mouth shape on robot attitude are all mediated by the perceived trustworthiness. Trustworthy human facial features could be applied to the robot's face, eliciting a similar trustworthiness perception and attitude. In addition to empirical contributions to HRI, this finding could shed light on the design practice for a trustworthy-looking social robot.

Faith in frames: unveiling therapeutic narratives in religion-related cinema through computational analysis

Introduction

This study explores the emotional impact of religion-related films through a "cinematherapy" lens. It aims to analyze the emotional patterns in a curated selection of religion-related films compared to a broader sample of acclaimed movies using facial recognition with YOLOv5 object detection. The study aims to uncover the potential therapeutic application of religion-related films.

Methods

Facial recognition with YOLOv5 object detection was utilized in this study to analyze the emotional patterns in religion-related films. A curated selection of these films was compared to a broader sample of acclaimed movies to identify any distinct emotional trajectories.

Results

The analysis of the emotional patterns revealed that religion-related films exhibited a subtler range of emotions compared to the broader film spectrum. This finding suggests that these films potentially create a safe space for contemplation, aligning with the profound themes often explored in religion-related films. Interestingly, the emotional arc observed in the films mirrored the spiritual journeys depicted in them. The films started with a low point of separation, transitioned through challenges, and culminated in a peak representing spiritual transformation.

Discussion

These findings suggest promise for the therapeutic application of religion-related films. The muted emotional expression in these films creates a safe space for self-reflection, enabling viewers to connect with the struggles of the characters and explore their own values when faced with complex religious ideas. This emotional engagement may contribute to therapeutic goals such as introspection and personal growth. The study unveils the unique emotional power of religion-related films and paves the way for further research on their potential as therapeutic tools. It emphasizes the need for continued exploration of the emotional impact of these films and their capacity to aid in therapeutic goals.

Public first aid education model design study based on user experience

Background

Presently, China's first aid penetration rate remains relatively low, leaving ample room for improvement in the existing first aid education model. Given its role as a service for the general public, public first aid education must thoroughly consider the learning needs and experiences of the public when designing the teaching mode.

Methods

Semi-structured interviews were employed to gather detailed insights into participants' experiences in the first aid learning process. Subsequently, NVivo was utilized to analyze the interviews and identify specific design strategies. Additionally, a 7-point scale questionnaire was employed to assess the intervention effects of music familiarity and the simulation of teaching aids on users' willingness and confidence in learning. Building upon the design strategy, a "feedback device + app" approach was proposed. Finally, user satisfaction was evaluated through a scale questionnaire.

Results

The use of familiar music had a significant positive effect on participants' willingness and confidence to learn, while users' fear of teaching aids had no effect on willingness and confidence. The user experience-based first aid education model can better meet the public's learning needs for first aid knowledge and skills.

Conclusion

This study proposes a first aid education model based on user experience design methodology, which optimizes the public's self-learning experience by evoking positive emotions while circumventing negative emotions. The educational model was recognized by users in terms of design concepts and is expected to help increase first aid prevalence in the future.

Emotional experiences of service robots' anthropomorphic appearance: a multimodal measurement method

Anthropomorphic appearance is a key factor to affect users' attitudes and emotions. This research aimed to measure emotional experience caused by robots' anthropomorphic appearance with three levels - high, moderate, and low - using multimodal measurement. Fifty participants' physiological and eye-tracker data were recorded synchronously while they observed robot images that were displayed in random order. Afterward, the participants reported subjective emotional experiences and attitudes towards those robots. The results showed that the images of the moderately anthropomorphic service robots induced higher pleasure and arousal ratings, and yielded significantly larger pupil diameter and faster saccade velocity, than did the low or high robots. Moreover, participants' facial electromyography, skin conductance, and heart-rate responses were higher when observing moderately anthropomorphic service robots. An implication of the research is that service robots' appearance should be designed to be moderately anthropomorphic; too many human-like features or machine-like features may disturb users' positive emotions and attitudes.Practitioner Summary: This research aimed to measure emotional experience caused by three types of anthropomorphic service robots using a multimodal measurement experiment. The results showed that moderately anthropomorphic service robots evoked more positive emotion than high and low anthropomorphic robots. Too many human-like features or machine-like features may disturb users' positive emotions.

Facial Anthropomorphic Trustworthiness Scale for Social Robots: A Hybrid Approach

Social robots serve as autonomous systems for performing social behaviors and assuming social roles. However, there is a lack of research focusing on the specific measurement of facial trustworthiness toward anthropomorphic robots, particularly during initial interactions. To address this research gap, a hybrid deep convolution approach was employed in this study, involving a crowdsourcing platform for data collection and deep convolution and factor analysis for data processing. The goal was to develop a scale, called Facial Anthropomorphic Trustworthiness towards Social Robots (FATSR-17), to measure the trustworthiness of a robot's facial appearance. The final measurement scale comprised four dimensions, "ethics concern", "capability", "positive affect", and "anthropomorphism", consisting of 17 items. An iterative examination and a refinement process were conducted to ensure the scale's reliability and validity. The study contributes to the field of robot design by providing designers with a structured toolkit to create robots that appear trustworthy to users.

In robot we trust? The effect of emotional expressions and contextual cues on anthropomorphic trustworthiness

Following the evolution of technology and its application in various daily contexts, social robots work as an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) system to interact with humans. However, limited research has been done to discuss the role of emotional expressions and contextual cues in influencing anthropomorphic trustworthiness, especially from the design perspective. To address this research gap, the current study designed a specific robot prototype and conducted two lab experiments to explore the effect of emotional expressions and contextual cues on trustworthiness via a combination of subjective ratings and physiological measures. Results showed that: 1) positive (vs. negative) emotional expressions enjoyed a higher level of anthropomorphic trustworthiness and visual attention; 2) regulatory fit was expanded in parasocial interaction and worked as a prime to activate anthropomorphic trustworthiness for social robots. Theoretical contributions and design implications were also discussed in this study.

Managing changes in the environment of human-robot interaction and welfare services

The purpose of this study was to investigate decision-makers' views on changes that robotics will create in welfare services. The purpose was also to discover what the opportunities and challenges are in human-robot interaction during these changes and how to manage these changes. As a research method, an online survey was used. The survey was sent to Finnish decision-makers (N = 184). They were divided into three groups: Techno-positive (n = 66), Techno-neutral (n = 47), and Techno-critical (n = 71). According to the results, more than 80% of the respondents saw that robots can offer support in existing work tasks, and more than 70% saw that the robots can do existing tasks. The most often mentioned challenges were the reduction of interaction and the reduction of human touch. Further, there are various knowledge needs among the respondents. Most of the knowledge needs were not based on the technical use of the robots; rather, they were quite scattered. The results suggest that successful use and implementation of robots in welfare services require a comprehensive plan and change agents. This study suggests that techno-positive people could act as change agents, assisting in implementing the changes. In addition, to manage change in the welfare services it is essential to improve the quality of the information, solve the resistance to change, create organizational awareness, and understanding, and establish a psychological commitment to change the processes.

Biometrics Innovation and Payment Sector Perception

This paper presents an analysis of innovations in the biometrics market, which have started to play a very important role in personal identification and identification systems. The aim of the study was to analyze current customs and opinions regarding payment methods, as well as to identify threats and opportunities for new biometric solutions in this area. First, the history of the biometrics market is presented. Acceptance patterns of new technologies are explored and modified. The authors used literature reviews, qualitative research (focus groups), and quantitative research (questionnaire survey) as methods. The main value and importance of biometrics is the uniqueness of biometric patterns (e.g., face, fingerprint, iris, etc.), which takes the security of these systems to a new level. The results of the quantitative study based on the qualitative survey show positive verification of the hypothesized reasons; e.g., importantly, that the age of potential users of biometric payments influences the fear about personal data. Fear of losing personal data affects the perceived safety of biometric payments. Perceived security has a very strong influence on attitudes towards biometric payments, which is the strongest predictor of behavioral intention to use biometric payments.

Design Factors to Improve the Consistency and Sustainable User Experience of Responsive Interface Design

Computers have been extended to a variety of devices, such as smart phones, tablets, and smart watches, thereby increasing the importance of responsive interfaces across multi-terminal devices. To ensure a consistent and sustainable user experience for websites and software products, it is important to study the layout, design elements, and users’ visual perception of different terminal interfaces. In this paper, the multi-terminal interfaces of 40 existing responsive websites were studied in a hierarchical grouping experiment, and six typical interface layouts were classified and extracted. Then, the main design factors affecting interface consistency of the responsive website were extracted and classified through eye tracking and a questionnaire survey. Finally, taking a sales management software tool (SA) as an example for design application, we successfully created responsive interfaces across multi-terminal devices with a consistent and sustainable experience.

Enhancing the Sense of Attention from an Assistance Mobile Robot by Improving Eye-Gaze Contact from Its Iconic Face Displayed on a Flat Screen

One direct way to express the sense of attention in a human interaction is through the gaze. This paper presents the enhancement of the sense of attention from the face of a human-sized mobile robot during an interaction. This mobile robot was designed as an assistance mobile robot and uses a flat screen at the top of the robot to display an iconic (simplified) face with big round eyes and a single line as a mouth. The implementation of eye-gaze contact from this iconic face is a problem because of the difficulty of simulating real 3D spherical eyes in a 2D image considering the perspective of the person interacting with the mobile robot. The perception of eye-gaze contact has been improved by manually calibrating the gaze of the robot relative to the location of the face of the person interacting with the robot. The sense of attention has been further enhanced by implementing cyclic face explorations with saccades in the gaze and by performing blinking and small movements of the mouth.

An Animation Character Robot That Increases Sales

Performing the role of a shopping assistant is one promising application for social robots. Robot clerks can provide a richer experience for customers and increase sales; however, the scant opportunities for interaction with customers in real shopping environments is a typical drawback. We solve this problem by developing a unique networked salesclerk system that consists of a virtual agent that acts through the customer’s smartphone and a physical agent that performs as a robot salesclerk in an actual store environment. Toward this capability, in cooperation with Production I.G. Inc., an animation production company, we adopted a character named Tachikoma from “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex” (commonly known as the S.A.C. series) when designing the appearance and features of both agents. We conducted a field test to investigate how our system contributed to the sales of Ghost in the Shell anime-themed products, and the results showed the advantages of our system for increasing sales.

Enhance the Language Ability of Humanoid Robot NAO through Deep Learning to Interact with Autistic Children

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a life-long neurological disability, and a cure has not yet been found. ASD begins early in childhood and lasts throughout a person’s life. Through early intervention, many actions can be taken to improve the quality of life of children. Robots are one of the best choices for accompanying children with autism. However, for most robots, the dialogue system uses traditional techniques to produce responses. Robots cannot produce meaningful answers when the conversations have not been recorded in a database. The main contribution of our work is the incorporation of a conversation model into an actual robot system for supporting children with autism. We present the use a neural network model as the generative conversational agent, which aimed at generating meaningful and coherent dialogue responses given the dialogue history. The proposed model shares an embedding layer between the encoding and decoding processes through adoption. The model is different from the canonical Seq2Seq model in which the encoder output is used only to set-up the initial state of the decoder to avoid favoring short and unconditional responses with high prior probability. In order to improve the sensitivity to context, we changed the input method of the model to better adapt to the utterances of children with autism. We adopted transfer learning to make the proposed model learn the characteristics of dialogue with autistic children and to solve the problem of the insufficient corpus of dialogue. Experiments showed that the proposed method was superior to the canonical Seq2sSeq model and the GAN-based dialogue model in both automatic evaluation indicators and human evaluation, including pushing the BLEU precision to 0.23, the greedy matching score to 0.69, the embedding average score to 0.82, the vector extrema score to 0.55, the skip-thought score to 0.65, the KL divergence score to 5.73, and the EMD score to 12.21.

The effect of facial features on facial anthropomorphic trustworthiness in social robots

As the nature of human-robot relationships have become increasingly bound to shift from supervisor-machine to friend-companion, people have exhibited an increasing interest in making social judgments toward such anthropomorphic objects, such as trustworthiness. However, the facial features of social robots and their potential effect on anthropomorphic trustworthiness are seldom analyzed and discussed comprehensively. This study examined whether the trustworthiness perception toward a social robot shared similarity with baby schema features on the human face. It also explored the effects of different combinations of baby schema facial features, especially the positions and sizes of the eyes and mouth, on facial anthropomorphic trustworthiness. A 5-way mixed experiment (N = 270) was conducted accordingly. The results indicated that people would experience a high level of facial anthropomorphic trustworthiness toward robots with baby schema features (i.e., large eyes, with medium vertical and horizontal positions of the eyes and mouth). This paper contributes to the literature on facial anthropomorphic trustworthiness in human-robot interaction and provides suggestions for social robot design.

Effect of the Affordances of the FM New Media Communication Interface Design for Smartphones

Smartphone equipment has promoted the widespread use of new media communication, and users have changed from being passive to actively receiving information. This has changed people's lifestyles, and has enriched the convenience and entertainment value of knowledge acquisition. However, the new media communication systems can be too complex, and the interface design for users to interact with the new media may not be sufficiently intuitive, which causes interface usability problems. Therefore, this research study focuses on the concept of affordance and the impact of user perception pertinent to smartphone applications on frequency modulation (FM) new media interface design. The experiment is a between-subjects design using one-way ANOVA to examine three different operation modes, namely the Litchi, Himalayas and Archimedes types. The experimental data were obtained through task performance and subjective evaluation. The results indicate that: (1) Visual information presentation methods, such as viewing and deleting, affect user perception. The three operating modes revealed significant differences, with the Himalayas type taking the least amount of task performance time. (2) There were significant differences among the different operation modes, with the Himalayas type the best in terms of the users' subjective evaluation. (3) The overall analysis of task performance and satisfaction consistently showed that the Himalayas type was better than the Litchi and Archimedes types in all aspects. (4) Smartphone user interface applications provide users with cognitive support, objects, functions, and sensory affordance, which enhance the user's interactive experience of FM new media.