Despite the many recent achievements in developing and deploying social robotics, there are still many underexplored environments and applications for which systematic evaluation of such systems by end-users is necessary. While several robotic platforms have been used in gerontological healthcare, the question of whether or not a social interactive robot with multi-modal conversational capabilities will be useful and accepted in real-life facilities is yet to be answered. This paper is an attempt to partially answer this question, via two waves of experiments with patients and companions in a day-care gerontological facility in Paris with a full-sized humanoid robot endowed with social and conversational interaction capabilities. The software architecture, developed during the H2020 SPRING project, together with the experimental protocol, allowed us to evaluate the acceptability (AES) and usability (SUS) with more than 60 end-users. Overall, the users are receptive to this technology, especially when the robot perception and action skills are robust to environmental clutter and flexible to handle a plethora of different interactions.

翻译：尽管近年来社交机器人的开发与部署取得了诸多进展，但在许多尚未充分探索的环境和应用场景中，仍需要对这类系统进行终端用户的系统性评估。虽然已有若干机器人平台被应用于老年医疗保健领域，但具备多模态对话能力的社交交互机器人是否能在真实场景中发挥效用并获得接纳，这一问题仍有待解答。本文试图通过两轮实验部分回答该问题：我们在巴黎一家日间老年护理机构中，使用一台具备社交与对话交互能力的全尺寸仿人机器人，对患者及其陪伴者进行了实验研究。基于H2020 SPRING项目期间开发的软件架构及实验方案，我们通过超过60位终端用户评估了该系统的可接受性（AES）与可用性（SUS）。总体而言，用户对这项技术持接纳态度，尤其是在机器人的感知与行动能力能够适应环境干扰并灵活处理多样化交互时表现更为突出。