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Care to an older person is provided based on the care plan that was made by a care manager. Therefore, to improve the quality of elderly care, the quality of the care plan must first be improved. Care managers make care plans considering the physical and mental attributes of the elderly. But, as matters stand, these plans are based on the experience of care managers. Therefore, a framework that can support making appropriate care plans is called for. In order to m ake appropriate care plans, it is neccessary to clarify the relation between the attributes of the elderly and the care that should be provided. In this paper, data from a large‐scale investigation of the actual elderly care are analyzed and a process model for deciding the care is proposed. The model provides the necessary basis for what factors must be considered and how the care should be determined.

The authors have developed a robot called “Robovie” that has unique mechanisms designed for communication with humans. Robovie can generate human‐like behaviors by using human‐like actuators and vision and audio sensors. Software is a key element in the systems development. Two important ideas in human‐robot communication through research from the viewpoint of cognitive science have been obtained – one is importance of physical expressions using the body and the other is the effectiveness of the robot’s autonomy in the robot’s utterance recognition by humans. Based on these psychological experiments, a new architecture that generates episode chains in interactions with humans is developed. The basic structure of the architecture is a network of situated modules. Each module consists of elemental behaviors to entrain humans and a behavior for communicating with humans.