Long-term evaluation of a social robot in real homes

Abstract

As the employment of robots for long-term evaluations in home settings are just starting to be robust enough for research purposes, our study aims at contributing to humanrobot interaction research by adding longitudinal findings to a limited number of long-term social robotics home studies. We placed 70 commercially available robots within people’s homes for a period up to six months. In this paper, we report on the collected questionnaire data from 102 people living in these houses. The participants evaluated the robot and their user experiences at six points in time. We observed a mere-exposure effect which causes people to evaluate a novel stimuli more positively when they gain experience and get familiar with it. The participants evaluated several aspects of the robot. We found user experience initially dropped before rising again when the robot was used over a longer period of time.