Towards Considerate Embodied AI: Co-Designing Situated Multi-Site Healthcare Robots from Abstract Concepts to High-Fidelity Prototypes

TL;DR

This paper presents a 14-week multidisciplinary co-design process for developing embodied AI healthcare robots, emphasizing iterative prototyping from abstract ideas to high-fidelity models to create context-aware, socially responsive solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive co-design methodology integrating iterative prototyping and educational scaffolds for healthcare robots, with eight guidelines for considerate embodied AI design.

Findings

Iterative progression from abstract ideas to high-fidelity prototypes enhances understanding of real-world trade-offs.

Participants generated more deployable, context-aware AI solutions.

Guidelines improve the design of socially responsive and deployment-ready healthcare robots.

Abstract

Co-design is essential for grounding embodied artificial intelligence (AI) systems in real-world contexts, especially high-stakes domains such as healthcare. While prior work has explored multidisciplinary collaboration, iterative prototyping, and support for non-technical participants, few have interwoven these into a sustained co-design process. Such efforts often target one context and low-fidelity stages, limiting the generalizability of findings and obscuring how participants' ideas evolve. To address these limitations, we conducted a 14-week workshop with a multidisciplinary team of 22 participants, centered around how embodied AI can reduce non-value-added task burdens in three healthcare settings: emergency departments, long-term rehabilitation facilities, and sleep disorder clinics. We found that the iterative progression from abstract brainstorming to high-fidelity prototypes, supported by educational scaffolds, enabled participants to understand real-world trade-offs and generate more deployable solutions. We propose eight guidelines for co-designing more considerate embodied AI: attuned to context, responsive to social dynamics, mindful of expectations, and grounded in deployment. Project Page: https://byc-sophie.github.io/Towards-Considerate-Embodied-AI/