This paper presents a qualitative study conducted to explore perceptions, attitudes and expectations for a virtual assistive companion designed to supplement human caregiving and facilitate an improved quality of life and long-term health benefits for older adults. The study was conducted adopting a human-centred approach; employing focus groups and individual interviews with older adults, professional caregivers and psychologists specialized in the aging process. Results indicated that users were in favour of a virtual companion and highlighted its potential to assist the accomplishment of daily activities and make more efficient use of human care services. Humanlike communication and behaviour were desirable whereas mixed opinions were expressed about humanlike appearance. The ramifications of the study are discussed in the form of design implications for the development of a virtual assistive companion that possesses the appropriate "social skills" to establish and maintain comfortable and acceptable longterm interaction and offers "useful" support to older adults.  Categories and Subject Descriptors Design, Human Factors, Measurement. Human-centred design, older users, qualitative field study, health promotion, personalization, HCI. INTRODUCTION The increasing demand for healthcare and quality of life services to support the aging population has inspired researchers worldwide to explore the applicability of new intelligent technologies to support older adults to cope with the challenges of aging, live more independently and make more efficient use of care services. While human caregiving cannot and will not be replaced, assistive technologies have the potential to supplement human caregiving and to improve the quality of life for both older adults and their caregivers [25] . A range of computer-based techniques has been used in the design of advanced assistive technologies focused on "aging in place"; that is to enable older adults to remain in their homes for longer periods and help those who are in assisted living care facilities to maintain more independence there. Virtual computer-animated characters, also known as Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) [12] , have attracted a lot of attention over the past years and have been successfully used in health interventions, including several designed specifically for older users [2, 8, 26, 30] . ECAs move beyond the paradigm of computer as a tool and allow for multimodal interaction reflecting natural human-to-human communication. Recent research has shown that ECAs expressing empathetic emotions have the potential to enhance user's satisfaction, engagement [18] and performance in task achievement [23] . In the scope of the European project CaMeLi [10], we investigate the use of ECAs as long-term assistive companions for older adults (aged 65 and above). In this context, we define a successful "virtual assistive companion" as an agent that is seamlessly integrated into the living environment and follows the daily life patterns of its users with the key function to identify and attend to their needs, primarily in the sense of organizing and accomplishing their routine activities and self-managing their care. The companion has to be both "useful", i.e., able to carry out a variety of tasks in order to assist humans and "socially intelligent", i.e., to possess social skills in order to interact with people in a believable, comfortable and acceptable manner [14] . An ECA without these functional and social capabilities would not be engaging nor accepted and would thus fail to evolve a long-lasting beneficial relationship with its users. In order to identify "useful" functionality and to decide which "social skills" are required for an assistive ECA, both the application domain and the nature of interaction with its users need to be analysed in great detail [13] . We address this challenge from a technical and psychological standpoint and conduct a qualitative human-centred study with primary users (i.e., older adults aged 65 and above) and individuals caring for them (i.e., formal care professionals) at home and in assisted living care environments in two different countries, the Netherlands (NL) and Switzerland (CH). Specialists in gerontopsychology provide additional insight into the emotional and cognitive aging processes and propose methods of psychological intervention to improve the everyday care of older adults. Particularly, we investigate perceptions, attitudes and expectations towards the idea of a virtual assistive companion for older adults and explore the following research questions:
Tsiourti et al. REF explored the attitudes and perception of older adults towards different aspects of virtual companions during the design phase, pointing to the "usefulness" and "social intelligence" a determinant factors for the success.
Virtual assistive companions for older adults: qualitative field study and design implications
PervasiveHealth
Computer Science