TY - CPAPER U1 - Konferenzveröffentlichung A1 - Schnitzer, Benjamin A1 - Vural, Umut Can A1 - Schnitzer, Bastian A1 - Sardar, Muhammad Usman A1 - Fuerst, Oren A1 - Korn, Oliver T1 - Prototyping a Zoomorphic Interactive Robot Companion with Emotion Recognition and Affective Voice Interaction for Elderly People T2 - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction N2 - An aging society paired with a skilled labor shortage, particularly in European countries, requires a rethinking of deprecated structures. Intelligent assistive technologies, specifically socially assistive robots, addressing the gap between caretakers and elderly people in need of care have moved into the focus of debate due to their potentials to reduce costs, improve independence, and eventually raise quality of life. In this work, we outline the potentials of zoomorphic robot companions combining intelligent conversational abilities and emotion recognition. We then describe the prototyping of an emotion-sensing zoomorphic interactive robot companion including the development and implementation of a multimodal emotion recognition framework. This framework uses speech emotion recognition, sentiment analysis, and affective voice interaction based on a large language model. The prototyping has been accompanied by two studies on elderly peoples' design preferences regarding the proposed feature set as well as different embodiments to find the appropriate casing for the robot companion. This work provides valuable insights into the prototyping and can thus support future research endeavors in this area. KW - Robots KW - Robotics KW - Roboter KW - Elderly KW - Companion KW - Loneliness Y1 - 2024 SN - 2573-0142 SS - 2573-0142 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/3660244 DO - https://doi.org/10.1145/3660244 VL - 8 IS - EICS SP - 1 EP - 32 PB - ACM CY - New York ER -