# Artificial Emotional Intelligence in Socially Assistive Robots for Older Adults: A Pilot Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11167 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11167/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jan 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [EmoCaliber: Advancing Reliable Visual Emotion Comprehension via Confidence Verbalization and Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15528/) (2025)
- [Affective and Conversational Predictors of Re-Engagement in Human-Robot Interactions -- A Student-Centered Study with A Humanoid Social Robot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16449/) (2025)
- [Metarobotics for Industry and Society: Vision, Technologies, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00797/) (2024)
- [Better Spanish Emotion Recognition In-the-wild: Bringing Attention to Deep Spectrum Voice Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05148/) (2024)
- [NAC-TCN: Temporal Convolutional Networks with Causal Dilated Neighborhood Attention for Emotion Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07507/) (2023)
- [Building Altruistic and Moral AI Agent with Brain-inspired Emotional Empathy Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21882/) (2024)
- [Experimenting with Affective Computing Models in Video Interviews with Spanish-speaking Older Adults](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16870/) (2025)
- [Robot guide with multi-agent control and automatic scenario generation with LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10317/) (2025)
- [Designing and Evaluating a Conversational Agent for Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11478/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents our recent research on integrating artificial emotional intelligence in a social robot (Ryan) and studies the robot's effectiveness in engaging older adults. Ryan is a socially assistive robot designed to provide companionship for older adults with depression and dementia through conversation. We used two versions of Ryan for our study, empathic and non-empathic. The empathic Ryan utilizes a multimodal emotion recognition algorithm and a multimodal emotion expression system. Using different input modalities for emotion, i.e. facial expression and speech sentiment, the empathic Ryan detects users' emotional state and utilizes an affective dialogue manager to generate a response. On the other hand, the non-empathic Ryan lacks facial expression and uses scripted dialogues that do not factor in the users' emotional state. We studied these two versions of Ryan with 10 older adults living in a senior care facility. The statistically significant improvement in the users' reported face-scale mood measurement indicates an overall positive effect from the interaction with both the empathic and non-empathic versions of Ryan. However, the number of spoken words measurement and the exit survey analysis suggest that the users perceive the empathic Ryan as more engaging and likable.