| Sumario: | Purpose: The number of adults entering older adulthood is increasing across the world, with many communities often lacking the resources and services need to meet their needs. The result of these gaps in resources and services are creating significant challenges for healthy aging, overall quality of life, and ability to age in place. Aging-in-place is defined as "one's journey to maintain independence in one's place of residence as well as to participate in one's community" (Rogers et al., 2020). However, technologies such as socially assistive robots hold much potential in expanding the access to resources, which may help enhance quality of life, promote healthy aging, and support aging-in-place. Assistive robots can support health and psychological wellbeing, and serve as personal assistants (Flandorfer, 2012). However, there is limited understanding regarding the application of market-ready socially assistive robots to support healthy aging in the context of a home environment. More specifically, the health application of socially assistive robots to enhance older adults' ability to age-in-place and their quality of life is not well-defined. Our research explores the capability of a customizable, market-ready socially assistive robot called Misty II, developed by Misty Robotics, to facilitate health applications to support older adults. Method: Our interdisciplinary team consisted of experts in design for aging, human factors, and engineering. We developed a curated a set of tasks that would be feasible for Misty II to convey to older adults. These tasks included conversational assistance (e.g., weather forecast, check-in on how the day is going), support with controlling a home environment (e.g. turning off the lights), and health reminders (e.g., medication schedule, doctor appointments). Although Misty II is commercially available robot, it requires programing expertise to facilitate complex human robot interactions. We programmed Misty to simulate the human-robot interaction to demonstrate to older adults how this type of robot might be used in a home environment. Given older adults' limited experience with robots (Smarr et al., 2014), it is important to illustrate how such interactions might occur. To help display these potential applications we adapted and developed a set of videos which aim to provide an enhanced visual demonstration of the potential application of socially assistive robots. Results and Discussion: Understanding the role of socially assistive robots in the home to support healthy aging in an important component in enhancing the quality of life of older adults. Our efforts illustrate the need for interdisciplinary teams to develop the appropriate activities for commercial robots to support health activities. Furthermore, we identified essential considerations pertaining to application of socially assistive robots to support healthy aging. In the next phase of our research, we will identify facilitators and barriers for older adults' acceptance and use of a socially assistive robot like Misty II to support healthy aging.
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