Designing for In-Home Long-Term Family-Robot Interactions: Family Preferences, Connection-Making, and Privacy

Abstract

Participatory approaches to designing technology with families, for families allow designers to have a first-hand understanding of needs, desires, and preferences of families toward new technology. For example, in my prior work, I conducted participatory design studies with children and their families in order to design social robots that could facilitate long term interactions, with multiple users, in their homes. Our design sessions identified that children and families preferred an in-home robot to have the role of a companion or an assistant, be able to hold group interactions and participate in shared recreation activities, and had concerns about the robot’s ability to follow conversational privacy norms (i.e., within a family, what information is shared with whom). In a long-term field deployment, I explored how children engaged in dyadic interactions with a reading companion robot in their homes and how interactions with multiple family members formed with and around the robot. However, family-centered insights are limited in the Human-Robot Interaction field. In my research I aim to further explore long-term family-robot interactions in group settings, with social companion robots that serve as a playmate or a confidant. I seek to design social robots that can facilitate connection-making between family members and mitigate communication privacy conflicts in these group interactions.