Autonomy for Older Adult-Agent Interaction
It addresses the problem of ensuring agent autonomy aligns with older adults' needs in aging populations, but is incremental as it builds on prior work without presenting new results.
This paper tackles the challenge of aligning AI-powered agents with older adults' autonomy preferences in caregiving, proposing research directions including addressing social responsibility autonomy, operationalizing agent autonomy from a task perspective, and developing autonomy measures.
As the global population ages, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered agents have emerged as potential tools to support older adults' caregiving. Prior research has explored agent autonomy by identifying key interaction stages in task processes and defining the agent's role at each stage. However, ensuring that agents align with older adults' autonomy preferences remains a critical challenge. Drawing on interdisciplinary conceptualizations of autonomy, this paper examines four key dimensions of autonomy for older adults: decision-making autonomy, goal-oriented autonomy, control autonomy, and social responsibility autonomy. This paper then proposes the following research directions: (1) Addressing social responsibility autonomy, which concerns the ethical and social implications of agent use in communal settings; (2) Operationalizing agent autonomy from the task perspective; and (3) Developing autonomy measures.