As populations age and technology becomes more pervasive, understanding the alignment between older adults’ values and technology design is paramount. More research is needed to understand how older adults’ living contexts shape their values and the use of technology. To address this, through a multi-context study, we explored how values differ for older adults and how their context of living might influence the adoption and use of technology. We conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with older adults in various residential contexts. We show that older adults tend to prioritize the same core values across living contexts, yet how they express values in each context differs. Technology can amplify or inhibit key values. We describe implications for context-responsive technology and design for continuity, to allow older adults to continually uphold important values through technology use.

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research in real-world settings may lead to unanticipated, emotionally charged moments. While impacts of these moments on participants are reported in the literature, researchers’ emotions, which can affect participants’ experiences, are often left unreported. Learning from these moments is essential for advancing HRI quality and real-world deployment success. We introduce "Emotional Entanglements" as a lens in HRI to define a researcher's capacity to anticipate, absorb, respond to, and recover from emotionally impactful events. Collecting testimonials using collaborative autoethnography from eleven researchers, we surface recurring emotional entanglements experienced in HRI studies, including tears with mixed meaning, participant attachment and loss upon robot withdrawal, and consequential participant decisions attributed to the robot, as well as how researchers navigated them amidst protocol constraints. This paper provides an actionable guide to "Emotional Sustainability in HRI", raising awareness of these often unreported situations and offering strategies for mitigation.

As the population of older adults increases, there is a growing need for support for them to age in place. This is exacerbated by the growing number of individuals struggling with cognitive decline and shrinking number of youth who provide care for them. Artificially intelligent agents could provide cognitive support to older adults experiencing memory problems, and they could help informal caregivers with coordination tasks. To better understand this possible future, we conducted a speed dating with storyboards study to reveal invisible social boundaries that might keep older adults and their caregivers from accepting and using agents. We found that healthy older adults worry that accepting agents into their homes might increase their chances of developing dementia. At the same time, they want immediate access to agents that know them well if they should experience cognitive decline. Older adults in the early stages of cognitive decline expressed a desire for agents that can ease the burden they saw themselves becoming for their caregivers. They also speculated that an agent who really knew them well might be an effective advocate for their needs when they were less able to advocate for themselves. That is, the agent may need to transition from being unremarkable to remarkable. Based on these findings, we present design opportunities and considerations for agents and articulate directions of future research.

The population of older adults experiencing cognitive decline is growing faster than the number of workers who can care for them. Artificially intelligent (AI) agents could assist these older adults, keeping them in their homes longer. For this to happen, older adults must be willing to adopt and rely on agents. Would they trust an agent that might need to report their decline to others? We conducted a speed dating study exploring the impact of agent affiliation (i.e., who the agent should work for). Our healthy and declining participants reacted positively to the idea of agents supporting them. They particularly recognized how the agent would reduce the burden placed on their family caregivers. They viewed affiliation to be dynamic, shifting from the declining older adult and orienting more to their caregivers over the course of cognitive decline. They envisioned the agent modifying its decision-making process to be like their caregivers’.

Playful robotics engages children in learning through play experiences while simultaneously developing critical thinking, and social, cognitive, and motor skills through play. Such playful experiences are particularly valuable in inclusive education to promote social and inclusive behaviors. We present TACTOPI, an inclusive and playful multisensory environment that leverages tangible interaction and a robot as the main character. We investigate how TACTOPI supports play in 10 dyads of children with mixed visual abilities. Results show that multisensory elements supported children to experience activities as joyful. Storytelling and guided-play added a layer of meaningfulness to the activities, and the robot engaged children in minds-on thinking. TACTOPI afforded children to engage in collaborative social play and facilitated supportive and inclusive behaviours. We contribute with a playful multisensory environment, an analysis of the effect of its components on social, cognitive, and inclusive play, and design considerations for inclusive multisensory environments that prioritize play.

Previous attempts to make block-based programming accessible to visually impaired children have mostly focused on audio-based challenges, leaving aside spatial constructs, commonly used in learning settings. We sought to understand the qualities and flaws of current programming environments in terms of accessibility in educational settings. We report on a focus group with IT and special needs educators, where they discussed a variety of programming environments for children, identifying their merits, barriers and opportunities. We then conducted a workshop with 7 visually impaired children where they experimented with a bespoke tangible robot-programming environment. Video recordings of such activity were analyzed with educators to discuss children's experiences and emergent behaviours. We contribute with a set of qualities that programming environments should have to be inclusive to children with different visual abilities, insights for the design of situated classroom activities, and evidence that inclusive tangible robot-based programming is worth pursuing.