Development of a Preliminary Use Case for Socially Assistive Robot-Augmented Early Intervention with Clinical Stakeholders

Abstract

Use cases are tools designed to capture functional requirements of a system according to user goals by incorporating a description of the user's characteristics, their goals, additional actors' imperative to the environment, and the specific story of the user using the system. Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) attempt to create close and affective human robot interactions designed to motivate, train, supervise, educate, or facilitate communication in the rehabilitation process. The purpose of this study was to develop a specific use case for SAR-augmented early intervention in collaboration with clinical stakeholders. The clinical stakeholders participated in qualitative semi-structured interviews designed to elicit a preliminary use case to guide the design of the robot. While the results represent a single implementation of a SAR for the rehabilitation of children with neuromotor dysfunction, the primary contribution of this paper is to present a repeatable methodology to create use cases for SARs for a multitude of different demographics, including both children and adults with and without disabilities.