The impact of head movements on user involvement in mediated interaction

•We examine engagement within conversational behaviours of the subject when interacting with a socially expressive system.•We found real-time communication requires more than verbal communication, and head nodding.•Head nodding effects depend on precise on-screen movement by synchronize the on-screen movement with the head movement.

Communication takes place not only through speech, but also through gestures such as facial expressions, gaze, head movements, hand movements and body posture. Although developing rapidly, current communication platforms do not facilitate the types of behaviour we believe are needed to fully support non-verbal communication and make interactions more engaging and efficient. In this paper, we decided to focus our research specifically on the head rather than any other body part as it is a rich source of information for speech-related movement. Thus we aim in this study to investigate the value of incorporating head movements into the use of telepresence robots as communication platforms; by means of investigating a system that manually reproduces head movement as closely as possible. The essential quantitative results revealed no significant differences on any of the measures we used. However, the qualitative information from the experiment indicates of further research will be useful in this area. These findings suggest that an enclose body language are required for a real-time communication beside the head nodding.