Assistive Robotics for Healthy Aging: A Foundational Phenomenological Co-Design Exercise

TL;DR

This paper explores how involving older people in the design of assistive robots can lead to better technologies that meet their real needs and improve their quality of life.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel co-design methodology using personas and speculative designs to capture the lived experiences of older people and caregivers.

Findings

Older people face everyday difficulties that could be addressed by assistive robotics.

Participants suggested ideas for how assistive robots could improve their lives.

Concerns about the introduction of robots highlight the need for thoughtful design and societal considerations.

Abstract

Assistive robotics for helping older people live well and stay independent has, to date, failed to fulfill its promise: there are few assistive robots in everyday use. In part, this failing can be attributed to inadequate or missing co-design activities that would ensure that these technologies and any services that incorporate them are developed with prospective end users, addressing their actual needs and wants, and not merely for them, and based on lazy assumptions about heterogeneous user groups.

This exercise aimed to address some of these limitations by taking a “phenomenological snapshot” of what it means to be an older person in the current sociotechnological context, and making this snapshot, along with the co-design materials developed, available to the wider assistive robotics community to provide solid foundational evidence for steering the development of assistive robotics in more productive directions.

Two rounds of co-design workshops have been conducted with older people and their caregivers, based on an innovative methodology that used personas and speculative designs to explore sensitive everyday difficulties faced by participants and highlight some of their general wishes for and concerns about assistive robotics. The data collected during the workshops were analyzed, and key themes were extracted.

Analysis of the workshop data gives access to the lived experience of older people and their caregivers, and their opinions about domestic robotics and assistive technologies more generally. The findings are organized thematically as everyday difficulties, the daily problems faced by older people; ideas for aging better, older people’s own suggestions for how their lives could be improved; and living with technology, their preferences and requirements for assistive robots, along with their concerns about what the introduction of robots might mean, both for themselves and for society more widely.

We believe that our findings provide solid foundational evidence for the development of assistive robotics for older people. We are in the process of disseminating these results through various channels to the wider assistive robotics community; ultimately, the success of our activities will be demonstrated only through the development of acceptable, useful, and viable assistive robotics for older people.

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