ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Dement.
Sec. Dementia Care
This article is part of the Research TopicSocial Robots in Dementia Care and WellnessView all articles
Let's Make Up a Story: Design and Evaluation of an Improvisational Storytelling Robot to Foster Older Adults' Meaning and Purpose in Life
Provisionally accepted
Long-Jing Hsu1*
Swapna Joshi1Erin Seliger1Kyrie Jig Amon1
Waki Kamino1
Natasha Randall1Weslie Khoo1David J. Crandall1Abhijeet Agnihotri2
Katherine Tsui2
Selma ˇSabanovi´c1- 1Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, United States
- 2Toyota Research Institute, Cambridge, United States
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Objective: Improvisational storytelling can encourage older adults to reflect on their meaning and purpose in life by creatively bringing up valuable patterns and themes from their memories and experiences. Robots for storytelling with older adults have so far aimed to boost their cognitive function and social interactions, rather than a pursuit of meaning and personal reflection. Methods: We used empirical analysis of expert storytelling facilitators to design a Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) operated robot that engages older adults in improvisational storytelling to tap into their meaning and purpose in life. Results: Our analysis of stories created by 16 participants and their interactions with the robot suggests that older adults reflected on family, relationships, and activities meaningful to them and engaged with the robot as a companion during the activity. Discussion: We provide design implications for an autonomous storytelling robot and discuss the potential for information collected during the storytelling activity to further foster exploration of meaning and purpose among older adults.
Keywords: Meaning and purpose, Storytelling Robot, improvisation, older adults, engagement, wizard-of-oz, Autonomous RobotDesign
Received: 22 Aug 2025; Accepted: 29 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hsu, Joshi, Seliger, Amon, Kamino, Randall, Khoo, Crandall, Agnihotri, Tsui and ˇSabanovi´c. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Long-Jing Hsu, longjinghsu@gmail.com
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.