Anxiety and depression are among the most common mental health conditions that affect black women (BW) living in the US. Nevertheless, BW with anxiety and/or depression (BWA/D) are under-diagnosed and under-treated, resulting in severe and prolonged somatic symptoms. Although technology research suggests the potential of social robots for mental health, these works rarely highlight the needs of BWA/D or how their lived experiences can shape these technologies. We contribute a relational and somatic speculative approach – rooted in Black Feminist and decolonial praxis – to designing social robots for and with BWA/D. Our work illustrates how self-reflexive and dialogic processes situated in BWs’ lived experiences can reshape the design of social robot-mediated mental well-being.

On-demand, last-mile delivery -- the transportation of goods from a local distribution center to the customer's door within a specified time window -- is used by people with disabilities (PwDs) for a variety of reasons. While delivery robots have potential in this space, they often widen disparities in access for PwDs. Inspired by the concept of pluriversality, which embraces the diversity of worldviews, we facilitated participatory design workshops with PwDs to co-design accessible and equitable delivery robots. Our findings support the importance of delivery robots with varied form factors that are robust and customizable to support diverse PwDs and their respective needs and preferences. We also provide broader considerations for automation in delivery ecosystems.

Guide robots have the potential to improve the experience of independent travel for people who are blind or have low vision. While many technical challenges for robot guides have been studied, open questions about robot behaviors and features remain. We conducted a two-phase user study with 16 blind and low-vision participants. First, we tested whether robot path planners that account for specific orientation cues affect users’ comfort and spatial awareness. Then, we elicited user preferences for guide robots through semi-structured interviews and scenario-based design sessions. We provide insights regarding desired robot behaviors and features that impact robot usability, human agency vs. autonomy, and perceived safety.

Interpersonal synchrony (IS), the behavioral and physiological coordination across time and space, plays a crucial role in social interactions by fostering empathy, closeness, and prosocial behaviors. However, there is a need for more examination of human-robot interaction (HRI) research focused on interactions where the temporal alignment of body movements and the spatial coordination of the content produced by those movements is vital to the quality of the interaction, such as in joint visual art-making. In this work, we investigated the impact of IS on human raters’ perceptions of a human-robot (HR) dyad engaged in a joint painting activity. We conducted two online studies (n = 70, total) in which participants watched 4 videos (1 repeated synchronous video and 3 asynchronous videos). We varied the degree of IS displayed by an HR dyad on two axes: (a) temporal alignment (e.g., speed of producing brush strokes) and (b) spatial similarity (i.e., similarity in the visual content produced). Our results indicate that some temporal and spatial dimensions of IS displayed by an HR dyad during joint painting have significant positive impacts on external observers’ perceptions of the robot, including prosocial tendencies (i.e., empathy, synchrony, and closeness) and acceptance. These findings are significant for emergent research on collaborative robots.

Many academic subjects are inaccessible for students who are blind or have low vision (BLV) due to the prevalence of visual aids to represent concepts. Interactive devices offer promise as creative tools for teachers of the visually impaired (TVIs) as they can support real-time iteration of adapted learning materials, display changing information, and provide embodied learning experiences for BLV students. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 5 educators (all have TVI experience) and identified their considerations when creating adaptations, attitudes towards technology, and perspectives on existing barriers to access. Our findings reveal and reaffirm unresolved challenges in the adaptation process as well as offer insights into key factors that must be considered when selecting the type of adaptation. From these findings, we formulate design recommendations for interactive tools that support TVIs in creating effective adaptations for BLV students.

Haptic feedback is important for immersive, assistive, or multimodal interfaces, but engineering devices that generalize across applications is notoriously difficult. To address the issue of versatility, we propose Parametric Haptics, geometry-based tactile feedback devices that are customizable to render a variety of tactile sensations. To achieve this, we integrate the actuation mechanism with the tactor geometry into passive 3D printable patches, which are then connected to a generic wearable actuation interface consisting of micro gear motors. The key benefit of our approach is that the 3D-printed patches are modular, can consist of varying numbers and shapes of tactors, and that the tactors can be grouped and moved by our actuation geometry over large areas of the skin. The patches are soft, thin, conformable, and easy to customize to different use cases, thus potentially enabling a large design space of diverse tactile sensations.

The ability to effectively read and interpret tactile graphics and charts is an essential part of a tactile learner’s path to literacy, but is a skill that requires instruction and training. Many teachers of the visual impaired (TVIs) report that blind and visually impaired students have trouble interpreting graphics independently without individual instruction. We present PantoGuide, a low-cost system that provides audio and haptic guidance, via skin-stretch feedback to the dorsum of a user’s hand while the user explores a tactile graphic overlaid on a touchscreen. This system allows programming of haptic guidance patterns and cues for tactile graphics that can be experienced by students learning remotely or that can be reviewed by a student independently. We propose two teaching scenarios (synchronous and asynchronous) and two guidance interactions (point-to-point and continuous) that the device can support – and demonstrate their use in a set of applications we co-design with one co-author who is blind and a tactile graphics user.

Social media platforms facilitate communication through sharing photos and videos. The abundance of visual content creates accessibility issues, particularly for people who are blind or have low vision. While assistive technologies like screen readers can help when alt-text for images is provided, synthesized voices lack the human element that is important for social interaction. Here, we investigate when it makes the most sense to use human narration as opposed to a screen reader to describe photos in a social media context. We explore the effects of voice familiarity (i.e., whether you hear the voice of someone you know) and the perspective of the description (i.e., first vs. third person point-of-view (POV)). Preliminary study suggests that users prefer hearing from a person they know when the content is described in first person POV, whereas synthesized voice is preferred for content described in third person POV.