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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 and preferences regarding the suitable visual qualities of SARs 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. Our results indicate that Israeli and German designers share similar perceptions of visual qualities and most of the robotics roles. However, 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.
The isolation measures adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic brought light to discussions related to the importance of meaningful social relationships as a basic need to human well-being. But even before the pandemic outbreak in the years 2020 and 2021, organizations and scholars were already drawing attention to the growing numbers related to lonely people in the world (World Economic Forum, 2019). Loneliness is an emotional distress caused by the lack of meaningful social connections, which affects people worldwide across all age groups, mainly young adults (Rook, 1984). The use of digital technologies has gained prominence as a means of alleviating the distress. As an example, studies have shown the benefits of using digital games both to stimulate social interactions (Steinfield, Ellison & Lampe, 2008) and to enhance the effects of digital interventions for mental health treatments, through gamification (Fleming et al., 2017). It is with these aspects in mind that the gamified app Noneliness was designed with the intention of reducing loneliness rates among young students at a German university. In addition to sharing the related works that supported the application development, this chapter also presents the aspects considered for the resource's design, its main functionalities, and the preliminary results related to the reduction of loneliness in the target audience.
Gamification in Industrial Production: An Overview, Best Practices, and Design Recommendations
(2023)
This work describes gamification as a path to increase both productivity and motivation of persons working in industrial production. While gamification has been established in pedagogy or health more than two decades ago, its transgression to the industrial domain started around the year 2010. A discussion of production-specific requirements and the psychological background provide an overview on production-oriented gamified solutions in recent years. We look at how gamification designs evolved to minimize distraction while maximizing acceptance. Based on three best practices, we describe ways to neatly integrate gamification into workflows, use context-awareness to augment work and adapt the challenge-level to keep users in a state of flow. Furthermore, we investigate ways to further increase acceptance by creating user-specific “bottom-up” gamification designs, like custom agents and branded gamification. The overview concludes with design recommendations tailored for the production domain.
During the periods of social isolation to contain the advance of COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021, educational institutions have had the challenge to adopt technological strategies not only to ensure continuity in students’ classes, but also to support their mental health in a period of uncertainty and health risks. Loneliness is an emotional distress caused by the lack of meaningful social connections; it has increasingly affected young adults worldwide during the pandemic's social isolation and still bears psychological effects in the current post-pandemic period. In the light of this challenge, the Nonenliness App was developed as a way to bring together university communities to address issues related to loneliness and mental health disorders through a gamified and social online environment. In this paper, we present the app and its main functionalities (Beta version) and discuss the preliminary results of a pilot clinical study conducted with university students in Germany (N = 12) to verify the app's efficacy and usability, alongside the challenges faced and the next steps to be taken regarding the platform's improvement.
This work documents the rising acceptance of social robots for healthcare as well as their growing economic potential from 2017 to 2021. The comparison is based on two studies in the active assisted living (AAL) community. We first provide a brief overview of social robotics and a discussion of the economic potential of social health robots. We found that, despite the huge potential for robotic support in healthcare and domestic routines, social robots still lack the functionality to access that potential. At the same time, the study exemplifies a rise in acceptance: all health-related activities are more accepted in 2021 when in 2017, most of them with high statistical significance. When investigating the economic perspective, we found that persons are aware of the influence of cultural, spiritual, or religious beliefs. Most experts (57%), having a European background, expect the state or the government to be the key driver for establishing social robots in health and significantly prefer leasing or renting a social health robot to buying one. Nevertheless, we speculate that it might be a global financial elite which is first to adopt social robots.
Due to the increasing aging of the population, the number of elderly people requiring care is growing in most European countries. However, the number of caregivers working in nursing homes and on daily care services is declining in countries like Germany or Italy. This limits the time for interpersonal communication. Furthermore, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, social distancing during contact restrictions became more important, causing an additional reduction of personal interaction. This social isolation can strongly increase emotional stress. Robotic assistance could contribute to addressing this challenge on three levels: (1) supporting caregivers to respond individually to the needs of patients and residents in nursing homes; (2) observing patients’ health and emotional state; (3) complying with high hygiene standards and minimizing human contact if required. To further the research on emotional aspects and the acceptance of robotic assistance in care, we conducted two studies where elderly participants interacted with the social robot Misa. Facial expression and voice analysis were used to identify and measure the emotional state of the participants during the interaction. While interpersonal contact plays a major role in elderly care, the findings reveal that robotic assistance generates added value for both caregivers and patients and that they show emotions while interacting with them.
The transition from college to university can have a variety of psychological effects on students who need to cope with daily obligations by themselves in a new setting, which can result in loneliness and social isolation. Mobile technology, specifically mental health apps (MHapps), have been seen as promising solutions to assist university students who are facing these problems, however, there is little evidence around this topic. My research investigates how a mobile app can be designed to reduce social isolation and loneliness among university students. The Noneliness app is being developed to this end; it aims to create social opportunities through a quest-based gamified system in a secure and collaborative network of local users. Initial evaluations with the target audience provided evidence on how an app should be designed for this purpose. These results are presented and how they helped me to plan the further steps to reach my research goals. The paper is presented at MobileHCI 2020 Doctoral Consortium.
Loneliness, an emotional distress caused by the lack of meaningful social connections, has been increasingly affecting university students who need to deal with everyday situations in a new setting, especially those who have come from abroad. Currently there is little work on digital solutions to reduce loneliness. Therefore, this work describes the general design considerations for mobile apps in this context and outlines a potential solution. The mobile app Noneliness is used to this end: it aims to reduce loneliness by creating social opportunities through a quest-based gamified system in a secure and collaborative network of local users. The results of initial evaluations with the target audience are described. The results informed a user interface redesign as well as a review of the features and the gamification principles adopted.
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.
Recent advances in motion recognition allow the development of Context-Aware Assistive Systems (CAAS) for industrial workplaces that go far beyond the state of the art: they can capture a user's movement in real-time and provide adequate feedback. Thus, CAAS can address important questions, like Which part is assembled next? Where do I fasten it? Did an error occur? Did I process the part in time? These new CAAS can also make use of projectors to display the feedback within the corresponding area on the workspace (in-situ). Furthermore, the real-time analysis of work processes allows the implementation of motivating elements (gamification) into the repetitive work routines that are common in manual production. In this chapter, the authors first describe the relevant backgrounds from industry, computer science, and psychology. They then briefly introduce a precedent implementation of CAAS and its inherent problems. The authors then provide a generic model of CAAS and finally present a revised and improved implementation.