Towards Real-World Dementia Care: Encouraging Activity Engagement Using an Intelligent Humanoid Robot

Dongjun Wu; Lihui Pu; Rene Hexel; Jun Jo; Wendy Moyle

doi:10.1177/07334648251348001

Towards Real-World Dementia Care: Encouraging Activity Engagement Using an Intelligent Humanoid Robot

Dongjun Wu^*
, Lihui Pu
, Rene Hexel
, Jun Jo
, Wendy Moyle

^*Corresponding author for this work

Internal Medicine

Griffith University Queensland

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

5 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Humanoid social assistive robotics (SARs) can promote activity engagement for older adults living with dementia. Few studies, however, evaluate the capacity of humanoid SARs to encourage activity engagement in long-term aged care facilities (LACFs). The complexity of the environment, robot design, and personal attributes underscore the challenge of humanoid SARs to encourage activity engagement in practice. This study employed a mixed-methods approach involving nine participants (aged ≥65 years) with mild to moderate cognitive impairment from one aged care facility and seven carers from four different Australian states. Through the triangulation of observational engagement data, participants’ semi-structured interviews, and carers focus group discussion, six themes encompassing activity engagement were identified and are discussed for future application and evaluation of humanoid SARs in dementia care: (1) robot physical design, (2) interaction patterns, (3) activity guidelines, (4) intervention environment, (5) personal history, and (6) relationship establishment.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	720-732
Number of pages	13
Journal	Journal of Applied Gerontology
Volume	45
Issue number	4
Early online date	3 Jun 2025
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/07334648251348001
Publication status	Published - Apr 2026

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Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

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Cite this

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title = "Towards Real-World Dementia Care: Encouraging Activity Engagement Using an Intelligent Humanoid Robot",

abstract = "Humanoid social assistive robotics (SARs) can promote activity engagement for older adults living with dementia. Few studies, however, evaluate the capacity of humanoid SARs to encourage activity engagement in long-term aged care facilities (LACFs). The complexity of the environment, robot design, and personal attributes underscore the challenge of humanoid SARs to encourage activity engagement in practice. This study employed a mixed-methods approach involving nine participants (aged ≥65 years) with mild to moderate cognitive impairment from one aged care facility and seven carers from four different Australian states. Through the triangulation of observational engagement data, participants{\textquoteright} semi-structured interviews, and carers focus group discussion, six themes encompassing activity engagement were identified and are discussed for future application and evaluation of humanoid SARs in dementia care: (1) robot physical design, (2) interaction patterns, (3) activity guidelines, (4) intervention environment, (5) personal history, and (6) relationship establishment.",

author = "Dongjun Wu and Lihui Pu and Rene Hexel and Jun Jo and Wendy Moyle",

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AU - Jo, Jun

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N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

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Towards Real-World Dementia Care: Encouraging Activity Engagement Using an Intelligent Humanoid Robot

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