In an era of social distancing and quarantine, many people worldwide have to learn new things and communicate from home. Cognitive training slows the decline of executive mental and physical functions in the aging brain. 

Older adults cannot access cognitive training in clinics or hospitals due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is essential to use home-based physical therapy and other activities to keep them engaged and motivated in the long term.

Virtual reality (VR) and even physical or socially assistive robots (SAR) have been used to make this possible. But which technology is most effective? Scientists at Ben-Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev in Beersheba suggest a mixture of methods for remote training via virtual reality (VR) and interactive social robots. Social robots are autonomous devices that interact and communicate with humans by following their social behaviors and rules. VR is a computer-generated environment with scenes and objects that appear natural, making users feel immersed in their surroundings. This environment is perceived through a VR headset or helmet device.

Their findings were just published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Human-Computer Studies under the title “Young and old users prefer immersive virtual reality over a social robot for short-term cognitive training.”

They argue that previous tests VR versus social robots for cognitive training compare apples to apples when they need to be comparing apples to oranges.

“Until now, most studies compared a physical robot to a virtual reality robot, so it was no surprise that the participants overwhelmingly favored the physical robot. But to truly assess their effectiveness, a socially adaptive robot needs to be compared to immersive virtual reality,” explained lead researcher Prof. Shelly Levy-Tzedek.

They believe that theirs was the first study in the world using their techniques, which can be adapted per user to account for differences in personal preferences across users and for changes in these preferences over time. 

They tested how each platform was viewed by users, whether there was a preference to use one of the platforms over the other for training in the short and long term and whether the choice was connected to differences such as age, gender, personality traits, and the tendency to feel empathy for others. 

They found that participants viewed the robot as a social and empathic creature with human-like qualities and felt involved, interested, and excited in the VR experience.  

Unlike studies elsewhere that showed a tendency to prefer interaction with physical, social robots over virtual experiences, participants in the BGU study who needed short-term cognitive training chose the feeling of “being there” provided by VR over social presence with a physically present social robot. When training was required over a long period, the researchers found that “being there” using VR was important too and that a combination of platforms would be more effective. 

Levy-Tzedek and her student Orit Cohavi pitted an immersive VR experience against a socially-assistive robot. They tested both the VR and the robot on 64 adults – 32 older adults, 32 younger adults, half men, and half women.

Levy-Tzedek is a Recanati School for Community Health Professions in the physical therapy department in BGU’s Faculty of Health Sciences and the Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience. Chavi of the Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences programmed both the robot and the VR.

The VR experience took users through a series of scenes – from a rental apartment to driving down a street, being under the ocean, or piloting a plane. To pass from one to the next, the participants had to solve a task in the scene (in a book open on the desk in the apartment or on a billboard that occurs during the driving stage).

The robot offered cognitive tasks with LED screens on its belly and in its eyes, with participants hitting the space bar to indicate their answers. In between, the robot interacted with the participants by talking to them, dancing, and exercising. 

The team found that for a short-term task, the participants overwhelmingly preferred VR (66%), but participants were split over which they would prefer VR or SAR over the longer term.

“Our study shows, for the first time, that it might not be just VR or just SAR, but rather a combination of the two that will keep people engaged and coming back for more training,” she concluded