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About

Daniela Wurhofer is a pioneering researcher in human-robot interaction (HRI), whose work sits at the intersection of user experience, social acceptance, and the psychological dimensions of living and working alongside robots. With over 300 cumulative citations, her scholarship has significantly shaped how researchers and designers think about people's relationships with robotic systems across diverse contexts. Wurhofer's most celebrated contribution, her 2009 study on children's emotional attachment to the robotic dog AIBO (102 citations), revealed the profound affective bonds humans can form with social robots—an insight that continues to inform social robotics design today. Her early work also interrogated broader societal attitudes, questioning public readiness for a "robotic society" and examining the nuanced social acceptance challenges that accompany autonomous versus tele-operated systems. A distinctive thread running through her research is a longitudinal, temporal perspective on HRI. Through studies conducted in real industrial settings—notably semiconductor factories—she traced how workers' expectations, feelings, and experiences with robots evolve over months and years, offering rare, grounded insights into workplace robotics deployment. Her methodological innovations, including adapted heuristic evaluation frameworks for HRI, further equip practitioners with practical tools for designing more human-centered robotic systems.