Impression Difference Between Intelligent Medicine Case and Small Service Robot in Self-Medication Support Situations

Medication management support systems were developed to prevent recipient’s mistakes such as forgetting to take medicine. The systems remind recipients to take medicine at the right time via a medicine case with a built-in speaker or display, and they must keep recipient motivation to continue doing so. In this research, the authors found factors to keep the motivation by evaluating recipient impression of a management support system. In addition to an intelligent medicine case, a small service robot was used as a reminder to supplement the above because some researchers reported that a robot has good features as a user interface. The authors defined three experimental situations and two conditions and compared the conditions in the situations based on a semantic differential. Questionnaires for overall evaluation and video analysis for objective evaluation were also used. Experimental results suggested that humane, friendly, flamboyant, sunny, and simple impressions improve recipient motivation and concentration.