Anthropomorphism and trust are two variables that are measured in a multitude of HRI studies. These two variables are often treated as dependent variables influenced by a particular robot design or behavior. However, psychological literature suggests that people have individual tendencies to anthropomorphize, influencing these two variables. We ran an experiment in which 70 participants were confronted with two robots, a humanoid and a non-humanoid robot. Before exposing them to the robots, they were screened for their individual tendency to anthropomorphize. After exposure, they rated the robots in terms of anthropomorphism and trust. With this experiment, we show that the individual tendency to anthropomorphize has a clear impact on measuring anthropomorphism and trust with frequently used questionnaires. Given our results, we emphasize that future studies should screen participants for their tendency to anthropomorphize to avoid unwanted biases.

This paper reports on a study investigating the influence of cultural background on the distance people keep in communication mediated by telepresence robots. Such robots are used increasingly to allow people to connect across distances without traveling for economic, ecological, and even political reasons. However, little is known about how and whether differences in face-to-face communication between people from different cultural backgrounds also play a role in communication mediated by a telepresence robot. To close that gap and inform the design of telepresence robots, we ran a study with 20 participants from Germany and 20 from Cameroon, who talked to each other in different pairs via a telepresence robot. Our results suggest that their cultural background had an influence on distancing behavior and on the comfort they perceived with the distance. These and other results inform the design of telepresence robots for intercultural settings.

In human-robot interaction, the effect of anthropomorphism on trust is an interesting topic for researchers. However, there is still no clear understanding of how an anthropomorphic design affects trust. To address this, we designed a comparative study with a robot with a human-like shape and a technically shaped robot that could perform the same cooperative task. The task was first performed correctly and then with a failure by the robots. In the correct condition, both robots were similarly trusted by the participants. However, in the failure condition, the participants trusted the anthropomorphically shaped robot more. This indicated that only in the case of failure does anthropomorphism affect trust, suggesting that anthropomorphism dampens the dissolution of trust in the case of failure. Future research should consider how different types of manipulations for anthropomorphism or combinations of manipulations affect trust.

As human-robot interaction (HRI) grows in importance both in practice and research, the emphasis often lies on close collaboration and the complex dynamics of humans and robots working together. This development necessitates a deep understanding of crucial aspects of that interaction. One of these aspects is trust. The dynamics of trust appear to be diverse, and several factors can have an impact. To deepen our understanding of the multiple facets that trust in HRI entails, this research investigates the effects of different types of trust violations on trust during a handover task. Contrary to previous works focusing primarily on robotic failures, however, this paper emphasizes trust violations that appear to represent more realistic cases for understanding trust violations. Therefore, we compare a violation that can be seen as a clear failure with one that can be seen as a deviation from what a user would expect from the robot. Moreover, we implemented these two violations on two types of robots, a technical robotic arm and a humanoid robot, and compared their effects on trust. The empirical study was conducted with 40 participants. The results of the study revealed that there are no significant differences regarding the violation’s impact on trust–neither did the comparison of the robot types yield any significant differences. Potential reasons for this, along with its implications, are discussed.

Trust is important for collaboration.In hybrid teams of humans and robots, trust enables smooth collaboration and reduces risks.Just as collaboration between humans and robots differs from interpersonal collaboration, so does the nature of trust in human-robot interaction (HRI).Therefore, further investigations on trust formation and dissolution in HRI, factors affecting it, and means for keeping trust on an appropriate level are needed.However, our knowledge of interpersonal trust and trust in autonomous agents cannot be transferred directly to HRI.In this paper, we present a study with 32 participants on trust formation and dissolution as well as forecasting to influence trust in an industry robot.Results show differences in dynamics and factors of trust formation and dissolution.Additionally, we find that the effect of forecasting on trust depends on task success.These findings support the design of trustful human-robot interaction and corresponding robotic team members.

Robots are gradually being freed from their safety fences due to the advances in safety features integrated with most new robots. These robots enable a new form of human-robot interaction in which contact is possible. There are two robot-related factors that play a decisive role in the interaction dynamics and human perception in such a case – the motion speed and distance the robot keeps away from the human. Literature indicates that these factors influence whether humans perceive trust, safety, and comfort, which are essential components in the acceptance of robots by their end users. However, although speed and distance were intensively investigated in isolation, little is known about their combined effect. To this end, we conducted an experiment investigating the impact of the industrial robot arm’s approaching speed and stopping distance on the users’ trust, safety, and comfort while they were performing a collaborative task. Our results provide interesting insights into the implications of speed and trust. While we were able to replicate former studies in terms of implications of speed and distance, our data does not show any interaction effect between the two variables. However, our participants’ observations indicated that distance impacts the dependent variables more severely than speed.

Professional caregivers often face complex situations in which they need the support of a colleague or a specialist. This is especially necessary for caregivers during their training or with less practice in certain tasks. Due to time and space restrictions, colleagues or specialists are not always available for local support. Remote support by streaming videos to a remote helper has been discussed in healthcare domains as a so-called teleconsultation. However, little is known about how to apply teleconsultation in care. We conducted a study with caregivers and remote helpers to compare head mounted devices (HMDs) for teleconsultation in care to two alternative solutions using smartphones. We found that despite lacking familiarity, HMDs have good potential for remote support in care, and that creating video streams with smartphones is not preferable for teleconsultations. We suggest that ideal support needs to balance freedom and guidance and suggest how such support needs to be further explored.

With growing interest regarding cooperation support using Augmented Reality (AR), social presence has become a popular measure of its quality. While this concept is established throughout cooperation research, its role in AR is still unclear: Some work uses social presence as an indicator for support quality, while others found no impact at all. To clarify this role, we conducted a literature review of recent publications that empirically investigated social presence in cooperative AR. After a thorough selection procedure, we analyzed 19 publications according to factors influencing social presence and the impact of social presence on cooperation support. We found that certain interventions support social presence better than others, that social presence has an influence on user's preferences and that the relation between social presence and cooperation quality may depend on the symmetry of the cooperation task. This contributes to existing research by clarifying the role of social presence for cooperative AR and deriving corresponding design recommendations.

In this work, we propose a computational robot trust model based on the predictability of the human partner as the main factor that impacts robot trust. Using this model and based on the robot’s knowledge about the task, the robot switches its behavior between conservative and normal, and adjusts the implemented safety mechanism as a function of the current robot trust level. We illustrate the proposed model impact on the outcome of the collaboration using a simple scenario. The results show a significant improvement in safety conditions of the human in collaboration with a robot at the cost of justifiable team performance reduction.

Abstract A substantial body of human-computer interaction literature investigates tools that are intended to support reflection, e.g. under the header of quantified self or in computer-mediated learning. These works describe the issues that are reflected on by users in terms of examples, such as reflecting on financial expenditures, lifestyle, professional growth, etc. A coherent concept is missing. In this paper, the reflection object is developed based on activity theory, reflection theory and related design-oriented research. The reflection object is both what is reflected on and what is changed through reflection. It constitutes the link between reflection and other activities in which the reflecting person participates. By combining these two aspects—what is reflected on and what is changed—into a coherent conceptual unit, the concept of the reflection object provides a frame to focus on how to support learning, change and transformation, which is a major challenge when designing technologies for reflection.

Augmented Reality (AR) systems are on their way to industrial application, e.g. projection-based AR is used to enhance assembly work. Previous studies showed advantages of the systems in permanent-use scenarios, such as faster assembly times. In this paper, we investigate whether such systems are suitable for training purposes. Within an experiment, we observed the training with a projection-based AR system over multiple sessions and compared it with a personal training and a paper manual training. Our study shows that projection-based AR systems offer only small benefits in the training scenario. While a systematic mislearning of content is prevented through immediate feedback, our results show that the AR training does not reach the personal training in terms of speed and recall precision after 24 hours. Furthermore, we show that once an assembly task is properly trained, there are no differences in the long-term recall precision, regardless of the training method.

Augmented Reality can provide orientation and awareness in situations in which objects or people are occluded by physical structures. This is relevant for many situations in the workplace, where objects are scattered across rooms and people are out of sight. While several AR mechanisms have been proposed to provide awareness and orientation in these situations, little is known about their effect on people's performance when searching objects and coordinating with each other. In this paper, we compare three AR based mechanisms (map, x-ray, compass) according to their utility, usability, social presence, task load and users' preferences. 48 participants had to work together in groups of four to find people and objects located around different rooms. Results show that map and x-ray performed best but provided least social presence among participants. We discuss these and other observations as well as potential impacts on designing AR awareness and orientation support.

This paper discusses the potential of ICT to support reflective learning for professionals. We aggregated data collected in 20 field studies with 12 different applications, involving a total of 321 participants. The applications addressed individual reflection as well as collaborative reflection. Such a systematic analysis with different applications used across industry sectors and companies is unique in the current literature on computer-supported reflective learning in the workplace. Primarily, we assessed the reaction to reflection applications and their effectiveness regarding learning, behaviour change, and organisational impact. In addition, we investigated differences with respect to work experience. Results show that users had a positive reaction to the apps and perceived their use to be beneficial for their work by using them. In collaborative reflection an inexperienced employee can benefit from the experiences and perspectives of more experienced (co-)workers. In contrast, individual reflection was more profitable for more experienced workers. Notwithstanding the overall positive results, the actual implementation of reflection applications requires careful adaptation to the specific organisational and situational context, as well as introductory and accompanying measures to assure efficient and beneficial usage of the tools.

Abstract People can learn a lot through (collaborative) reflection at work: In organizations, staff debate experiences and due to issues every day, thus reflecting together and learning from each other. While this is desirable, it is often hindered by differences in time and space. Online discussions in community-like systems may provide a means to overcome this issue and enable staff to share experiences and learn from them. In this paper, we study two different data sets from two software systems to support online collaborative reflection in order to analyze what possible factors influence the occurrence of aspects of reflection in online discussions, like experiences, suggestions and learning. Our results include findings that partially approve existing models of (collaborative) reflection, but also others that add to or even challenge these models. Overall, we found that collaborative reflection may take different paths towards learning. From this we derive that facilitation mechanisms need to take up these paths, and that facilitation may be successful in different ways than anticipated from existing literature. We describe possible facilitation mechanisms and discuss their implementation.

Mixed reality (MR) cooperation scenarios are more and more interesting for business and research as powerful wearable devices like head mounted displays (HMD) become commercially available. A lot of work focuses on remote MR cooperation settings like remote maintenance support and co-located scenarios in which participants cooperate over a longer period time. Despite this, MR also has great potential for real-time co-located cooperation support with the need of short-term decisions and interactions. However, little is known on how this support can be provided. To bridge this gap, we conducted an experiment using a MR visual search task performed by dyads. Based on related work, visual search was chosen to represent typical challenges of short-term cooperative MR tasks. The aim of the experiment was to explore how the participants coordinate their searches and how this influences their performance in a task. We found that participants mainly used embodied and verbal cues to coordinate their searches (rather than virtual cues provided by the HMD) and that less communication worked significantly better, which is in (partial) contrast to existing findings. We discuss potential reasons for and impacts of these findings.

While mixed reality scenarios are highly relevant for cooperation support, most work done in this context is on individuals. When working on cooperation support scenarios in MR, we arrived at situations in which we needed insights into the way how people used the technology to work together. To support the investigation of this question, we created a 3D analysis tool for interactive and cooperative task support in MR. The tool and exemplary results from applying to a visual search experiment conducted in a cooperative mixed reality setting with Microsoft HoloLens devices are presented here. We show how it can uncover interaction otherwise not or hard to discover.

Reflection and collaborative reflection are common means for learning at work. Based on four studies on tool supported collaborative reflection, which created insights on barriers and opportunities for such support, we describe a concept of augmenting tools with reflection and a prototype showing how the concept can be implemented in typical TEL environments.

Coaching and reflection are established methods for learning from experiences and peer support at work. They support people with different means: While coaching is a rather formal, planned, structured and systematic process, reflection is rather informal, spontaneous and emergent. Despite these differences, coaching and reflection may complement each other. This helps to overcome barriers of the respective other method and closes a gap between formal-systematic and informal-self-organized approaches of learning at work. In this paper we ask how this complement can be supported by tools and describe an intertwined concept of reflection and coaching called “coflection”. We identify challenges associated with this concept, we present a prototype and we explain how the concept may solve problems at work by using real-world scenarios. The paper contributes to TEL by providing a concept that enables transitions between formal and informal learning.

Reflection is a common activity at work. Collaborative reflection is an activity in which multiple participants add to reflection by sharing experiences, perspectives and insights together, thus transcending individual capabilities. Despite its potential for change at workplaces, there are little insights on how to support collaborative reflection with technology. To close this gap, this paper analyses four cases in which a tool to support collaborative reflection has been used at different workplaces. It uses qualitative data from app usage, an analysis of content from the tool and feedback gathered from participants to shed light on how people use support tools for collaborative reflection. The results of this wok include factors supporting and constraining reflection in tools as well as implications for tool design.

Reflection is a common means to improve work: Every day, people think back to past work and - oftentimes in a group - try to find out whether they can improve it or whether they can derive better practices from it. However, especially collaborative reflection is neglected in research and design and consequently, there are hardly any insights on how it takes place in the practice of daily work and how tools can support it. To shed light on these questions, this paper presents a case that has been analyzed in a hospital as part of a series of studies on collaborative reflection in practice. Focusing this case and backing it with the other studies, the paper presents peculiarities and needs of collaborative reflection in healthcare workplaces as well as a more general formalization of collaborative reflection characteristics. Based on these results, an application to support physicians in their reflection was prototyped and tested. The presented results primarily apply to healthcare workplaces, but also cover general findings for the support of collaborative reflection.

In this paper we propose a model of Computer Supported Reflective Learning (CSRL) that links the reflection process to supportive ICT. The CSRL model has the potential to support analysis and design of CSRL solutions. It fills a gap that currently exists between theoretical work on reflection and research investigating technologies for reflection support. The model is based on theory, specifically concerning the reflection process, and on empirical work on reflective learning in work life carried out in five different test bed organizations.

Abstract Business Process Management is called agile when it is able to react quickly and adequately to internal and external events. Agile Business Process Management requires putting the life cycle of business processes on a new paradigm. It is advocated in this paper that social software allows us to satisfy the key requirements for enabling agile BPM by applying the four features of social software: weak ties, social production, egalitarianism and mutual service provision. Organizational and semantic integration and responsiveness (of the business processes engineering, execution and management activities) have been identified as the main requirements for implementing an agile BPM life cycle. Social software may be used in the BPM life cycle in several manners and using numerous approaches. This paper presents seven among them and then analyzes the ‘support’ effects between those approaches and the underlying social software features, and the three requirements for Agile BPM. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.