User-centered Feedback Design in Person-following Robots for Older Adults
This addresses interaction quality for older adults using assistive robots, but it is incremental as it builds on existing feedback design approaches.
This paper tackled the problem of designing feedback for person-following robots used by older adults, finding through user studies with 35 participants that they preferred basic status information delivered via continuous voice feedback.
Feedback design is an important aspect of person-following robots for older adults. This paper presents a user-centred design approach to ensure the design is focused on the needs and preferences of the users. A sequence of user studies with a total of 35 older adults (aged 62 years and older) was conducted to explore their preferences regarding feedback parameters for a socially assistive person-following robot. The preferred level of robot transparency and the desired content for the feedback was first explored. This was followed by an assessment of the preferred mode and timing of feedback. The chosen feedback parameters were then implemented and evaluated in a final experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of the design. Results revealed that older adults preferred to receive only basic status information. They preferred voice feedback overtone, and at a continuous rate to keep them constantly aware of the state and actions of the robot. The outcome of the study is a further step towards feedback design guidelines that could improve interaction quality for person-following robots for older adults.