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First Results of Studying Human Robot Interaction in the Wild — The Hobbit Robot Tested by Older Adults at Home

Authors:
Markus Vincze
Daniel Wolf
Markus Bajones
Astrid Weiss
Markus Suchi
David Fischinger
Jürgen Pripfl
Christoph Gisinger

Keywords: assistive robot, mobile manipulator robots

Abstract:
Falls are the primary cause for older adults that make it necessary to move to a care facility. One option is to wear a mobile device, with the limitation that it needs to be worn any time while a fall happens one time a year. Together with care professionals we worked on a mobile robotics solution that does not only discover falls, but is pro-active to avoid falls in the first place. Old people rapidly realized that a robot picking up objects from the floor is a great help. While tests in a laboratory setting showed the usefulness of this function, we needed to send the robot out into the user’s home to learn about the real challenges when approaching a realistic use case scenario. We present results stressing Human-Robot Interaction from a study where users tested the robot in their homes in three countries. Findings indicate that the pick-up function is highly valued, even if the robot costs go up considerably as opposed to a mobile robot without arm.

Pages: 286 to 291

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2016

Publication date: April 24, 2016

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4138

ISBN: 978-1-61208-468-8

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from April 24, 2016 to April 28, 2016