Caring for a Robot, to Care for You: An Exploration of Robot Care as an Interaction Design to Support Wellbeing

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Abstract

In this paper, we explore how having robots that require care can be used as a human-robot interaction design strategy to support people’s wellbeing. We present an original companion robot design that requires care, to support people who feel lonely. Following a longitudinal deployment, we present results which suggest that caring for a robot can help people by promoting companionship with the robot and providing a sense of purpose and daily life structure. We further provide suggestions for future robot designs that use requiring care as an interaction design strategy to support wellbeing.

Citation

Danika Passler Bates, Skyla Y. Dudek, James M. Berzuk, Adriana Lorena González, and James E. Young. 2024. Caring for a Robot, to Care for You: An Exploration of Robot Care as an Interaction Design to Support Wellbeing. In Proceedings of the RoboCare Design Workshop: Understanding, Translating, Operationalizing, and Scaling Up Design Knowledge Regarding Robotic Systems for Care Assistance (RCDW'24) at the ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’24), July 01–05, 2024, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, 4 pages.

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