Eating with an artificial commensal companion

Gallagher, Conor Patrick; Niewiadomski, Radoslaw; Bruijnes, M.; Huisman, G.; Mancini, Maurizio

doi:10.1145/3395035.3425648

Eating with an artificial commensal companion

Title

Eating with an artificial commensal companion

Author

Gallagher, Conor Patrick (Cork Constraint Computation Centre)
Niewiadomski, Radoslaw (Università di Trento)
Bruijnes, M. (TU Delft Interactive Intelligence)
Huisman, G. (Hogeschool van Amsterdam)
Mancini, Maurizio (Cork Constraint Computation Centre)

Date

2020

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.

Subject

Artificial companion
Computational commensality
Food choice
Social robot

To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:3827e38b-e387-4fd6-9edb-5da4582a3eaa

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1145/3395035.3425648

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

ISBN

9781450380027

Source

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