  We outline our work on evaluating robots that assist older adults by engaging
with them through multiple modalities that include physical interaction. Our
thesis is that to increase the effectiveness of assistive robots: 1) robots
need to understand and effect multimodal actions, 2) robots should not only
react to the human, they need to take the initiative and lead the task when it
is necessary. We start by briefly introducing our proposed framework for
multimodal interaction and then describe two different experiments with the
actual robots. In the first experiment, a Baxter robot helps a human find and
locate an object using the Multimodal Interaction Manager (MIM) framework. In
the second experiment, a NAO robot is used in the same task, however, the roles
of the robot and the human are reversed. We discuss the evaluation methods that
were used in these experiments, including different metrics employed to
characterize the performance of the robot in each case. We conclude by
providing our perspective on the challenges and opportunities for the
evaluation of assistive robots for older adults in realistic settings.
