Comparing Middle-Aged and Seniors’ Preferences Toward Virtual Agents and Android Robots: Is There a Generational Shift in Assistive Technologies’ Preferences?

The present research aims at investigating effects of participants’ age (middle-aged and seniors) and type of assistive device (female virtual agents vs female android robots) on users’ acceptance. The study involved 4 groups of two middle-aged and two seniors (for a total of 181) participants asked to ex- press their potential acceptance to be assisted in their daily routines by two female android robots/virtual agents. Acceptance was assessed in terms of scores assigned by participants to their willingness to interact with the female agents/robots and pragmatic (PQ), hedonic - identity (HQI), hedonic - feeling (HQF) and attractiveness (ATT) qualities. Video clips of the proposed agents or robots were randomly presented, and after each presentation, participants scored the proposed assistive device by filling either the VAAQ (Virtual Agent Acceptance) or the RAQ (Robot Acceptance) questionnaire. Repeated measures ANOVA were utilized to statistically assess participants’ preferences. Seniors were significantly more open to interact with virtual agents rather than robots, while middle-aged participants were showed slightly more open to interact with robots rather than agents. Participants’ gender significantly affected the evaluation of robots rather than agents’ one, and the appearance of the proposed de- vices (younger toward mature agents, or haired toward hairless robots), strongly affected users’ acceptance.