Populations in developed societies show an increasingly higher life expectancy across the globe. To support older adults to live longer and healthier lives in the familiar surroundings of their homes, technological developments, such as robots and avatars, have a great potential. To investigate long-term interactions between older adults and a "bi-bodied conversational agent" (an agent that has both an avatar and a robot embodiment), a user-centred design approach was employed in the design and development of a conversational agent. Firstly, the requirements of the agent were elicited through a set of focus groups with the target users – older adults. Then, the agent was iteratively designed and implemented: a robot body and avatar body were created. Finally, a Wizard-of-Oz control panel was created to control and compare each of the two bodies. Current research outcomes describe the elicited requirements baseline of a bi-bodied conversational agent for older adults. Future research involves the use of this set-up to investigate long-term interaction between older adults and a bibodied conversational agent.

This paper describes the design and development of an embodied conversational agent (ECA) that provides a social interface for older adults. Following a user-centred design approach, we implemented a multimodal agent consisting of a virtual character and a robot. This so-called "bi-bodied conversational agent for elderly" was iteratively refined and developed through participatory design and rapid prototyping in 3 consecutive focus groups with a total of 21 elderly users. In addition to the two bodies, a Wizard-of-Oz control panel was developed, enabling researchers to control both bodies so as to respond to the user's instructions, questions, and remarks. The research resulted in a platform that can be used for future research on elderly-robot and elderly-avatar interaction. In addition, the research resulted in insights about elderly users' preferences regarding the appearance and design of a virtual and a robotic ECA (Embodied Conversational Agent), described in results that can be reused in future experiments involving ECA for elderly users.