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Social Robots for Evaluating Attention State in Older Adults

Sustained attention is essential for older adults to maintain an active lifestyle, and the deficiency of this function is often associated with health-related risks such as falling and frailty. The present study examined whether the well-established age-effect on reducing mind-wandering, the drift t...

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Autores principales: Chen, Yi-Chen, Yeh, Su-Ling, Huang, Tsung-Ren, Chang, Yu-Ling, Goh, Joshua O. S., Fu, Li-Chen
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8586987/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34770448
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21217142
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author Chen, Yi-Chen
Yeh, Su-Ling
Huang, Tsung-Ren
Chang, Yu-Ling
Goh, Joshua O. S.
Fu, Li-Chen
author_facet Chen, Yi-Chen
Yeh, Su-Ling
Huang, Tsung-Ren
Chang, Yu-Ling
Goh, Joshua O. S.
Fu, Li-Chen
author_sort Chen, Yi-Chen
collection PubMed
description Sustained attention is essential for older adults to maintain an active lifestyle, and the deficiency of this function is often associated with health-related risks such as falling and frailty. The present study examined whether the well-established age-effect on reducing mind-wandering, the drift to internal thoughts that are seen to be detrimental to attentional control, could be replicated by using a robotic experimenter for older adults who are not as familiar with online technologies. A total of 28 younger and 22 older adults performed a Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) by answering thought probes regarding their attention states and providing confidence ratings for their own task performances. The indices from the modified SART suggested a well-documented conservative response strategy endorsed by older adults, which were represented by slower responses and increased omission errors. Moreover, the slower responses and increased omissions were found to be associated with less self-reported mind-wandering, thus showing consistency with their higher subjective ratings of attentional control. Overall, this study demonstrates the potential of constructing age-related cognitive profiles with attention evaluation instruction based on a social companion robot for older adults at home.
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spelling pubmed-85869872021-11-13 Social Robots for Evaluating Attention State in Older Adults Chen, Yi-Chen Yeh, Su-Ling Huang, Tsung-Ren Chang, Yu-Ling Goh, Joshua O. S. Fu, Li-Chen Sensors (Basel) Article Sustained attention is essential for older adults to maintain an active lifestyle, and the deficiency of this function is often associated with health-related risks such as falling and frailty. The present study examined whether the well-established age-effect on reducing mind-wandering, the drift to internal thoughts that are seen to be detrimental to attentional control, could be replicated by using a robotic experimenter for older adults who are not as familiar with online technologies. A total of 28 younger and 22 older adults performed a Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) by answering thought probes regarding their attention states and providing confidence ratings for their own task performances. The indices from the modified SART suggested a well-documented conservative response strategy endorsed by older adults, which were represented by slower responses and increased omission errors. Moreover, the slower responses and increased omissions were found to be associated with less self-reported mind-wandering, thus showing consistency with their higher subjective ratings of attentional control. Overall, this study demonstrates the potential of constructing age-related cognitive profiles with attention evaluation instruction based on a social companion robot for older adults at home. MDPI 2021-10-28 /pmc/articles/PMC8586987/ /pubmed/34770448 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21217142 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Chen, Yi-Chen
Yeh, Su-Ling
Huang, Tsung-Ren
Chang, Yu-Ling
Goh, Joshua O. S.
Fu, Li-Chen
Social Robots for Evaluating Attention State in Older Adults
title Social Robots for Evaluating Attention State in Older Adults
title_full Social Robots for Evaluating Attention State in Older Adults
title_fullStr Social Robots for Evaluating Attention State in Older Adults
title_full_unstemmed Social Robots for Evaluating Attention State in Older Adults
title_short Social Robots for Evaluating Attention State in Older Adults
title_sort social robots for evaluating attention state in older adults
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8586987/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34770448
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21217142
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