Abstract
Robot therapy for elderly residents in a care house was conducted over one year. Two therapeutic seal robots were introduced and activated for over 9 hours every day to interact with the residents. This paper presents a report of this experiment. In order to investigate the psychological and social influences of the robots, each subject was interviewed by using the free pile sort method, and their social interaction was analysed. In addition, the follow-up investigation was conducted after the robot was taken away. The results showed that the robots encouraged them to communicate with each other and then strengthened their social ties over the year.
