  Artificial companion agents are defined as hardware or software entities
designed to provide companionship to a person. The senior population are facing
a special demand for companionship. Artificial companion agents have been
demonstrated to be useful in therapy, offering emotional companionship and
facilitating socialization. However, there is lack of empirical studies on what
the artificial agents should do and how they can communicate with human beings
better. To address these functional research problems, we attempt to establish
a model to guide artificial companion designers to meet the emotional needs of
the elderly through fulfilling absent roles in their social interactions. We
call this model the Role Fulfilling Model. This model aims to use role as a key
concept to analyse the demands from the elderly for functionalities from an
emotional perspective in artificial companion agent designs and technologies.
To evaluate the effectiveness of this model, we proposed a serious game
platform named Happily Aging in Place. This game will help us to involve a
large scale of senior users through crowdsourcing to test our model and
hypothesis.
  To improve the emotional communication between artificial companion agents
and users, This book draft addresses an important but largely overlooked aspect
of affective computing: how to enable companion agents to express mixed
emotions with facial expressions? And furthermore, for different users, do
individual heterogeneity affects the perception of the same facial expressions?
Some preliminary results about gender differences have been found. The
perception of facial expressions between different age groups or cultural
backgrounds will be held in future study.
