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Socially assistive robots (SARs) are becoming more prevalent in everyday life, emphasizing the need to make them socially acceptable and aligned with users' expectations. Robots' appearance impacts users' behaviors and attitudes towards them. Therefore, product designers choose visual qualities to give the robot a character and to imply its functionality and personality. In this work, we sought to investigate the effect of cultural differences on Israeli and German designers' perceptions of SARs' roles and appearance in four different contexts: a service robot for an assisted living/retirement residence facility, a medical assistant robot for a hospital environment, a COVID-19 officer robot, and a personal assistant robot for domestic use. The key insight is that although Israeli and German designers share similar perceptions of visual qualities for most of the robotics roles, we found differences in the perception of the COVID-19 officer robot's role and, by that, its most suitable visual design. This work indicates that context and culture play a role in users' perceptions and expectations; therefore, they should be taken into account when designing new SARs for diverse contexts.
In the last years, social robots have become a trending topic. Indeed, robots which communicate with us and mimic human behavior patterns are fascinating. However, while there is a massive body of research on their design and acceptance in different fields of application, their market potential has been rarely investigated. As their future integration in society may have a vast disruptive potential, this work aims at shedding light on the market potential, focusing on the assistive health domain. A study with 197 persons from Italy (age: M = 67.87; SD = 8.87) and Germany (age: M = 62.15; SD = 6.14) investigates cultural acceptance, desired functionalities, and purchase preferences. The participants filled in a questionnaire after watching a video illustrating some examples of social robots. Surprisingly, the individual perception of health status, social status as well as nationality did hardly influence the attitude towards social robots, although the German group was somewhat more reluctant to the idea of using them. Instead, there were significant correlations with most dimensions of the Almere model (like perceived enjoyment, sociability, usefulness and trustworthiness). Also, technology acceptance resulted strongly correlated with the individual readiness to invest money. However, as most persons consider social robots as “Assistive Technological Devices” (ATDs), they expected that their provision should mirror the usual practices followed in the two Countries for such devices. Thus, to facilitate social robots’ future visibility and adoption by both individuals and health care organisations, policy makers would need to start integrating them into official ATDs databases.
Purpose: Participation and accessibility issues faced by gamers with multi-sensory disabilities are themes yet to be fully understood by accessible technology researchers. In this work, we examine the personal experiences and perceptions of individuals with deafblindness who play games despite their disability, as well as the reasons that lead some of them to stop playing games.
Materials and methods: We conducted 60 semi-structured interviews with individuals living with deafblindness in five European countries: United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, Greece and Sweden.
Results: Participants stated that reasons for playing games included them being a fun and entertaining hobby, for socialization and meeting others, or for occupying the mind. Reasons for stop playing games included essentially accessibility issues, followed by high cognitive demand, changes in gaming experience due their disability, financial reasons, or because the accessible version of a specific game was not considered as fun as the original one.
Conclusions: We identified that a considerable number of individuals with deafblindness enjoy playing casual mobile games such as Wordfeud and Sudoku as a pastime activity. Despite challenging accessibility issues, games provide meaningful social interactions to players with deafblindness. Finally, we introduce a set of user-driven recommendations for making digital games more accessible to players with a diverse combination of sensory abilities.
IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATION
- Digital games were considered a fun and entertaining hobby by participants with deafblindness. Furthermore, participants play games for socialization and meeting others, or for occupying the mind.
- Digital games provide meaningful social interactions and past time to persons with deafblindness.
- On top of accessibility implications, our findings draw attention to the importance of the social element of gaming for persons with deafblindness.
- Based on interviews, we introduce a set of user-driven recommendations for making digital games more accessible to players with a diverse combination of sensory abilities.
This article presents a study of cultural differences affecting the acceptance and design preferences of social robots. Based on a survey with 794 participants from Germany and the three Arab countries of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, we discuss how culture influences the preferences for certain attributes. We look at social roles, abilities and appearance, emotional awareness and interactivity of social robots, as well as the attitude toward automation. Preferences were found to differ not only across cultures, but also within countries with similar cultural backgrounds. Our findings also show a nuanced picture of the impact of previously identified culturally variable factors, such as attitudes toward traditions and innovations. While the participants’ perspectives toward traditions and innovations varied, these factors did not fully account for the cultural variations in their perceptions of social robots. In conclusion, we believe that more real-life practices emerging from the situated use of robots should be investigated. Besides focusing on the impact of broader cultural values such as those associated with religion and traditions, future studies should examine how users interact, or avoid interaction, with robots within specific contexts of use.
In pandemic times, the possibilities for conventional sports activities are severely limited; many sports facilities are closed or can only be used with restrictions. To counteract this lack of health activities and social exchange, people are increasingly adopting new digital sports solutions—a behavior change that had already started with the trend towards fitness apps and activity trackers. Existing research suggests that digital solutions increase the motivation to move and stay active. This work further investigates the potentials of digital sports incorporating the dimensions gender and preference for team sports versus individual sports. The study focuses on potential users, who were mostly younger professionals and academics. The results show that the SARS-CoV-19 pandemic had a significant negative impact on sports activity, particularly on persons preferring team sports. To compensate, most participants use more digital sports than before, and there is a positive correlation between the time spent physically active during the pandemic and the increase in motivation through digital sports. Nevertheless, there is still considerable skepticism regarding the potential of digital sports solutions to increase the motivation to do sports, increase performance, or raise a sense of team spirit when done in groups.
The findings presented in this article were obtained through a preliminary exploratory study conducted at the Offenburg University as part of the Fighting Loneliness project promoted by the institution’s Affective & Cognitive Institute (ACI) from October 2019 to February 2020. The initiative’s main objective was to answer the research question “How should an app be designed to reduce loneliness and social isolation among university students?” with the collaboration of the institution’s students.
In this article, we present a taxonomy in Robot-Assisted Training; a growing body of research in Human–Robot Interaction which focuses on how robotic agents and devices can be used to enhance user’s performance during a cognitive or physical training task. Robot-Assisted Training systems have been successfully deployed to enhance the effects of a training session in various contexts, i.e., rehabilitation systems, educational environments, vocational settings, etc. The proposed taxonomy suggests a set of categories and parameters that can be used to characterize such systems, considering the current research trends and needs for the design, development and evaluation of Robot-Assisted Training systems. To this end, we review recent works and applications in Robot-Assisted Training systems, as well as related taxonomies in Human–Robot Interaction. The goal is to identify and discuss open challenges, highlighting the different aspects of a Robot-Assisted Training system, considering both robot perception and behavior control.
This work demonstrates the potentials of procedural content generation (PCG) for games, focusing on the generation of specific graphic props (reefs) in an explorer game. We briefly portray the state-of-the-art of PCG and compare various methods to create random patterns at runtime. Taking a step towards the game industry, we describe an actual game production and provide a detailed pseudocode implementation showing how Perlin or Simplex noise can be used efficiently. In a comparative study, we investigate two alternative implementations of a decisive game prop: once created traditionally by artists and once generated by procedural algorithms. 41 test subjects played both implementations. The analysis shows that PCG can create a user experience that is significantly more realistic and at the same time perceived as more aesthetically pleasing. In addition, the ever-changing nature of the procedurally generated environments is preferred with high significance, especially by players aged 45 and above.