The Pet Plant: Developing an Inanimate Emotionally Interactive Tool for the Elderly
The development of an interactive “pet” house plant could provide the same positive health support functions as a robotic pet, and with fewer problems, if it could be shown that an emotional attachment with a human was possible. This required that an inan
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Abstract. The development of an interactive “pet” house plant could provide the same positive health support functions as a robotic pet, and with fewer problems, if it could be shown that an emotional attachment with a human was possible. This required that an inanimate living artifact (the plant) along with its pot, be accepted as stimulating emergent emotion. An experiment comparing an interactive, apparently aware, plant with a control was conducted in three retirement homes. Individuals were found to attribute emotions to the interactive plant that increased if the plant was described as having a character similar to that of the user. Results of the study support the conclusion that interactive plants have potential for further development as supportive companions to the elderly. Keywords: Persuasive technology, emergent emotion, interactive technology, robotic pet, elderly, health, restorative.
1 Introduction The study has been designed to explore whether the development of an interactive “pet” house plant that can generate an emotional attachment with a human is feasible. This study is part of a series designed to explore how emotional attachment to a living, but inanimate, artifact develops through human-object interaction. Psychological and physical factors that the human perceives as emotion and thereby motivates an individual to interact with a living, but immobile, objects are explored through a working prototype. The interactive plant is intended as a substitute for a companion animal (pet) in order to alleviate boredom, loneliness, stress and inactivity in residents of elderly care facilities where pets are not allowed. (In fact, the plant itself is not programmed to interact, but the pot, which is viewed as part of the potted house plant.) Robotic animal pets are currently being tested for therapeutic effects and have shown some promise [1], however there are some possible negative ethical, social and cultural aspects to their use that an interactive plant might avoid, or at least minimize. These are discussed in a later section. Y. de Kort et al. (Eds.): PERSUASIVE 2007, LNCS 4744, pp. 68–79, 2007. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
The Pet Plant: Developing an Inanimate Emotionally Interactive Tool for the Elderly
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2 Background 2.1 Emergent Emotion According to several researchers in the field of interactive robotics [2], human beings subjectively attribute emotions to machines that respond to their environment in ways that the humans can interpret according to their own emotional responses. [3] gives the example of a simple mobile robot with two light sensors. In one case the robot senses a light source straight ahead and moves towards it until it collides with the source. In another case, the light source is not directly ahead of the robot so the robot turns towards the light source and continues towards it until it collides again. In this case the action can be interpreted by a human observer as aggressive - the robot "sees" an object and "attacks" it. In the first case, the human ob
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