Is the social robot a product of artificial intelligence or is it a perception product by our natural intelligence, revealing some crucial aspects of social and cultural human processing? Among the smart objects, the social robot cannot be distinguished by precise and well defined technical or morphological cues. Even though no serious and discriminative attributes can be given by any science knowledge -- even the movement attribute, and the "autonomous'' cognitive attribute are not clearly defined -- in order to understand how an object becomes, perceptively, a subject (social robot), it is a fact that the automatons and the talking artefacts are now named robot, which is particularly attractive for general public, for scientists and engineers. However, is it a socio-cultural desire or a technical need to add the augmentation of the social space to the "augmented self'' (self body and self environment abilities)?

In this talk we will explore some social space perturbations in ecological conditions, such as elderly people suffering from isolation and interacting with a robot that can emit solely non-verbal speech primitives. Long term interactions were collected and analysed using the concepts of the Dynamic Affective Network for Social Entities (D.A.N.S.E.) theory. We will try to show that non-verbal speech primitives, organised in the D.A.N.S.E.'s "glue'' paradigm, permit to predict the relations with the robot perceived by elderly as oriented inside or outside dominance, but also to explore in particular an empathic dimension. Through a Living Lab method, evaluation of these hypotheses and building of an empathic socio-affective HRI were conducted together, within strong ethical constraints. In particular the development of frail robots for frail people will be proposed as possible ethical perspective.