Older adults are vulnerable to symptoms of depression. The degree of depression is particularly high among older adults who live alone. To address this issue, various companion robots, which are capable of psychologically communicating with users, have been proposed. However, older adults' preferences on the appearance of these robots have not been systematically investigated; this forms the focus of the present study. We interviewed 191 older adults; investigated their preferences on the design elements of robots including type, weight, and material; and analyzed the data by age, gender, and living arrangement. Our primary goal was to determine how companion robots should be designed, paying special attention to older adults who live alone. Our findings indicated that those living alone prefer a bear-like robot and negative to the heavy robot. Our results suggest that companion robots need to be designed with careful consideration of older adults' physical and psychological preferences.

A method of extracting major lines from a 2D image is presented. The novelty lies in that major lines are recruited from the maximally generated yet well-thinned zero threshold Canny edge links based on the, so called, Sobel highlights as the guide for recruitment. The Sobel highlights introduced here represent the scores accumulated at individual pixels that measure their significance of forming line segments along Sobel edge orientations. The proposed method offers several advantages over conventional ones: it is 1) more powerful to extract cursive lines, in particular, with a larger curvature, 2) more effective to represent a line as a whole with less intermittent discontinuities, and 3) more straightforward to use as it relies on no sensitive edge thresholding. Experimentations verify that the proposed method outperforms LSD, a top performance major line detector currently available, by about 20% in the coverage of ground truth major lines as well as in the coverage per major line: an intermittent discontinuity indicator. The extraction cycle time is about 54 msec using the Intel i7-2600 CPU and 4G RAM under Window 7.