Embodiment perception of a smart home assistant

Demographic growth and rise in the average age of the population is increasing the demand for the elderly assistance. Health care oriented ambient intelligence technologies are fundamental to support elderly peoples' autonomy. In this paper, we present a smart home system that is able to recognize human activities and is integrated with a proactive vocal assistant. We chose one of possible user scenarios to show the performance of this smart home system and to perform a preliminary comparison between users' experience while watching videos of a volunteer interacting with an embodied versus a not-embodied assistant. The scenario is recorded from the user's point of view, while the user interacts with a robot assistant or a simple vocal assistant. The results of the User Experience Questionnaire show that participants found the robot assistant considerably more attractive, innovative and stimulating in comparison to the vocal assistant.