Eating with an artificial commensal companion

Conor Patrick Gallagher, Radoslaw Niewiadomski, Merijn Bruijnes, Gijs Huisman, Maurizio Mancini

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)
69 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Commensality is defined as "a social group that eats together", and eating in a commensality setting has a number of positive effects on humans. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of technology on commensality by presenting an experiment in which a toy robot showing non-verbal social behaviours tries to influence a participants' food choice and food taste perception. We managed to conduct both a qualitative and quantitative study with 10 participants. Results show the favourable impression of the robot on participants. It also emerged that the robot may be able to influence the food choices using its non-verbal behaviors only. However, these results are not statistically significant, perhaps due to the small sample size. In the future, we plan to collect more data using the same experimental protocol, and to verify these preliminary results.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICMI 2020 Companion - Companion Publication of the 2020 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages312-316
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781450380027
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Event2020 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ICMI 2020 - Virtual, Online, Netherlands
Duration: 25 Oct 202029 Oct 2020

Publication series

NameICMI 2020 Companion - Companion Publication of the 2020 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction

Conference

Conference2020 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ICMI 2020
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityVirtual, Online
Period25/10/2029/10/20

Keywords

  • Artificial companion
  • Computational commensality
  • Food choice
  • Social robot

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