# \"Gynmy\": Designing and Testing a Robot for Physical and Cognitive Training of Older Adults
## 5 Discussion  
The findings revealed that the age group, negative attitude toward robots and education were individual characteristics that associated with the acceptance of the robotic system. Gender did not have a significant effect on any of the TAM components. The old-old group perceived the robotic trainer as significantly more useful than the younger-old group. The old-old group rated the robot's ease of use higher than the younger-old group and also yielded a higher score for the intention to use, but the differences were not significant. These trends do not conform with previous studies, which found that older adults in the younger age group expressed greater intent to use robots  
Figure 9: Technology acceptance conceptual model of a physical and cognitive robotic trainer. than their old-old counterparts, probably because the former group is more technologically oriented [58,59]. However, our findings may suggest that old-old adults have a greater need for the developed robotic system; therefore, they perceive it as more useful. Several younger participants noted in informal conversation after the experiment that they thought the experience with the robotic system was pleasant, but because they were physically active, the exercises provided by the system were not challenging for them. They believed the robot could benefit people who were less active or older. Accordingly, when designing a robotic system for older adults, it is clearly important to customize the system to the specific user needs and especially to ensure that the exercise difficulty matches (or slightly exceeds) the user's capability. The effects of education and negative attitudes toward robots corresponded to those observed in previous works. Graduate degrees had a positive association with the ease of use compared with high school education, resembling the findings on the acceptance of smartphones among older adults [71]. However, having an undergraduate degree resulted in a lower ranking for the ease of use in our analysis. This should be tested with a larger participant sample size in order to achieve clearer results. The negative attitude toward robots ranking was also found to have a significant association with the system's acceptability. For example, a negative attitude was found to have a negative correlation with the perceived usefulness of assistive and companion robots in a survey among older adults [72]. In our analysis, gender was not found to be associated with acceptability. This might be explained by the participants' familiarity with technology, which was similar for both genders in the present study, in contrast to other studies that did demonstrate a gender effect [58]. Although several participants expressed satisfaction with the cognitive training and recognized its importance, the inclusion of such training within the session did not have a significant effect on acceptability as it was not found to be included in any of the best or final regression models. This might be explained by the relative lack of complexity of the cognitive training or by the difficulty in discriminating between the two types of training sessions, meaning the participants did not experience much difference between the two types of sessions and thus did not express a different opinion following them. Subject to further analysis, the implication would seem to be that more complex cognitive training games are required and that they should form a more intrinsic part of the training. Another issue that was raised by the participants was that the insertion of cognitive training in the middle of the physical training was problematic and confusing. A possible solution might be to separate the two types of training. However, this would work against the notion of making the cognitive work intrinsic to the program and the notion that practice variability is actually necessary for skill improvement.