A participatory design approach to using social robots for elderly care

TL;DR

This research explores a participatory design method involving multiple stakeholder groups to develop social robots tailored for elderly care, emphasizing stakeholder concerns and engagement strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-stakeholder participatory design framework using card sorting, storyboarding, and workshops for social robot deployment in elderly care.

Findings

Stakeholder concerns identified through card sorting and storyboarding.

Attitudes towards social robots assessed via semi-structured interviews.

Engagement strategies for elderly groups developed through workshops.

Abstract

We present our ongoing research on applying a participatory design approach to using social robots for elderly care. Our approach involves four different groups of stakeholders: the elderly, (non-professional) caregivers, medical professionals, and psychologists. We focus on card sorting and storyboarding techniques to elicit the concerns of the stakeholders towards deploying social robots for elderly care. This is followed by semi-structured interviews to assess their attitudes towards social robots individually. Then we are conducting two-stage workshops with different elderly groups to understand how to engage them with the technology and to identify the challenges in this task.