The relationship between children and extended family members (such as grandparents) is extremely important, providing meaning, knowledge, and enjoyment. However, the distributed nature of our modern society has made it difficult for young children to remain connected with extended family. We conducted a study with young children and their parents, as well as grandparents of young children, to explore their needs and preferences when communicating remotely. Through the use of video prototypes, we found a number of themes related to the types of interactions that devices should afford for young children and grandparents. These include tensions between children’s independence and parental control, the need for child-led bursts of interaction, and considerations on device lifetime and the link to remote family members. In this paper, we detail our methodology and findings to arrive at design values for this particular user group.

Robophobia is a recent and growing trend on social media, where users create humorous videos that play on the general fear of robots. While framed as jokes, these videos contribute to the public’s attitudes and expectations of robots, influencing what is socially and culturally acceptable. To investigate this emerging trend, we conducted a thematic analysis of 200 English-speaking TikTok videos using online ethnography to explore how users engage with robophobia and what implications this may have for the Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) field. Our findings show that robophobia on TikTok is predominantly expressed through humorous skits and verbal abuse of real-world robots in public spaces. Common themes include fears about humans in romantic relationships with robots, and frequent use of derogatory terms such as “clanker” to verbally "dehumanize" robots. The robophobia trend is culturally embedded and reveals people’s underlying attitudes and fears toward robots in society, both now and in the future. We discuss the implications of these findings for the field of Human–Robot Interaction (HRI), emphasizing how public expectations are shaped by cultural narratives, and stress the need for culturally sensitive, expectation-aware HRI research and robot design.

Learning-by-teaching, where a child learns through the act of teaching or helping a peer learn, has been shown to provide better learning outcomes than standard methods. While learning-by-teaching has been explored in some contexts in Human-Robot Interaction, we propose utilizing strategic robot errors to improve children's learning. We conducted an experimental study with thirty-one 6–8-year-old children in which a robot read a book to a child and the child was asked to point out and correct any mistakes the robot made. There were three conditions: no mistakes, simple mistakes, and targeted mistakes. While our data was insufficient to determine whether the type of errors the robot made affected children's learning, we did find the number of mistakes identified across conditions was different and discuss the effect they may have had on the sessions. We discuss implications of this research for pedagogical applications and future research ideas.

Informed consent is an integral process in human-robot interaction (HRI); however, current practices have been criticized for overlooking the social, psychological, and embodied complexities of interacting with robots. Social robots’ embodied, human-like design and social behavior can lead to misaligned expectations that pose risks such as deception, overtrust, poor user experience, and psychological harm for users. Moreover, robots often collect personal data in ways that are not always visible or understood by users. Typically, informed consent does not address such issues, highlighting the need for consent processes tailored to HRI. In this paper, we reimagine informed consent and introduce the RoboConsent framework, drawing from previous HRI research highlighting these issues and feminist consent models that address power imbalances and move toward a user-centered process. The framework consists of five components that ensure meaningful informed consent and six principles that guide how it can be obtained. These work in tandem to create informed consent practices that address the unique dynamics of HRI.

When families live in the same home, they feel a sense of connection through the subtle, passive aspects of family life. Over distance, these passive aspects are hard to experience as most communication technologies support sharing conversations or activities. Through a research-through-design methodology, we explored the design of smart home technologies for passive co-presence over distance. Based on our design explorations, we arrived at an interaction space which includes the dimensions of Activity, Solitude, Synchronicity, and Spontaneity. Our research-through-design process additionally resulted in the design of two smart home systems. The There Chair employs the senses of touch and sight to passively display when a remote family member is sitting at the dining room table. The Fragrance Frame is a paired picture frame that detects when a remote family member is passing by their frame, and emits a scent reminiscent of togetherness. We reflect on our design decisions and propose considerations for future design.

Emergency response to large-scale disasters is often supported with multimedia from social media. However, while these features are common in everyday video calls, the complex needs of 911 and other systems make it difficult to directly incorporate these features. We assess an ME911 (Multimedia-Enabled 911) app to understand how the design will need to deviate from common norms and how callers will respond to those non-standard choices. We expand the role of 911 call taker control over emergency situations to the calling interface while incorporating key features like map-based location finding. Participants’ experiences in mock emergencies show the non-standard design helps callers in the unfamiliar setting of emergency calling yet it also causes confusion and delays. We find the need for emergency-specific deviations from design norms is supported by participant feedback. We discuss how broader system changes will support callers to use these non-standard designs during emergencies.

While children with disabilities often face barriers to play including reduced time, exclusion, and ill-suited toys, impacting their development, social robots provide the potential to help: they can motivate children, increase task engagement, and facilitate social interactions. However, social robots (and technological interventions in general) struggle to be adopted into regular use within homes by families, commonly being abandoned after a short time. Rather than focusing on the utility of these interventions, we instead look how they integrate into family needs and lifestyles. We designed and conducted a study where we engaged children living with disabilities and their families, using interactions with real robots and exploratory exercises, to learn about their perspectives, needs, and concerns regarding adopting a social companion robot in their home. We analyzed participant task engagement and feedback from the perspective of supporting play for children with disabilities and presented resulting design recommendations for addressing primary concerns and matching key expectations, and to support adoption pathways to improve the chances of success.

The spread of COVID-19 has encouraged the practice of using video conferencing for family doctor appointments. Existing applications and off-the-shelf devices face challenges in dealing with capturing the correct view of patients' bodies and supporting ease of use. We created Dr.’s Eye, a video conferencing prototype to support varying types of body exams in home settings. With our prototype, we conducted a study with participants using mock appointments to understand the simultaneous use of the camera and display and to get insights into the issues that might arise in real doctor appointments. Results show the benefits of providing more flexibility with a decoupled camera and display, and privacy protection by limiting the camera view. Yet, challenges remain in maneuvering two devices, presenting feedback for the camera view, coordinating camera work between the participant and the examiner, and reluctance towards showing private body regions. This inspires future research on how to design a video system for doctor appointments.

Playing remote tabletop games is a fun way to connect with distant friends. Yet most systems for remote tabletop gaming lack support for tangible and social interaction, two important aspects of gameplay for most players. We are interested in how to better design systems for remote tangible gameplay that support social connection. We investigate this topic through the design and evaluation of a prototype system for playing the board game Wavelength across two locations. First, we describe the design goals that informed our prototype: “Remote Wavelength”. Then, we discuss the results of a qualitative user study in which ten friend groups played Remote Wavelength. Our findings indicate that a synchronized, tangible gameboard benefits player engagement, communication, and awareness. Our results also illustrate the value of integration across communication and gameplay systems. We conclude by offering considerations for the design of both digital and remote tangible gameplay systems.

When emerging adults move out of their parents’ homes for the first time, their needs for togetherness and connection evolve, as do their parents’. In co-located homes, people often experience togetherness passively by sensing one another’s presence in their environment. However, when no longer living together, methods of experiencing togetherness change. Thus, we conducted an interview and co-design study with 16 pairs of parents and emerging adults that explores this concept across distance. The study uncovered differences in the connection needs of emerging adults and their parents, including their goals in connecting, the amount of communication they needed, and their needs for privacy and transparency. We additionally found that passive connecting factors included ambient sounds of the home, visual shared experiences and traces of one another in the home, ambient home smellscapes and smell memories, touching left-behind objects or gifted objects, and the taste of family recipes and the ambience of family mealtimes. We discuss suggestions for designing for passive co-presence based on this new knowledge.

Robots are being developed to help in various settings with young children. However, research suggests that children may overtrust robots, which can have a negative impact when such trust is unwanted or unsafe. Based on recent results from the community we suggest designing robots to use intentional errors to potentially reduce children’s trust in robots and to mitigate overtrust. We present a breakdown of robot errors that might affect children’s trust towards robots, and which could be used intentionally to mitigate overtrust. This includes accuracy errors, responsiveness errors, and error recovery strategies. We highlight how they could be used to decrease trust. We lastly provide an agenda for researchers to further investigate how the intentional use of robot errors could help to mitigate children’s overtrust in robots.

Telemedicine systems that involve the use of video conferencing technologies have been available for more than three decades. Yet, they have primarily been used for specialist appointments or within health care facilities. We are now seeing a shift with the proliferation of commercial technologies, such as smartphone apps that allow people to have appointments with a general practitioner from nearly any location for various reasons. Telemedicine has also seen an uptake due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, little is known about how doctors and patients perceive smartphone-based telemedicine systems, what types of medical ailments are best suited for these systems, what sociotechnical challenges might emerge through their usage, and how systems should be designed to best meet the needs of both doctors and patients. Thus, we applied a scenario-based design method by presenting a set of medical situations to both general practitioners and patients, and conducted contextual interviews with them to investigate their thoughts on video-based appointments for a range of medical situations. Results show that video consultations using smartphone apps could raise challenges in delivering appropriate care and utilization, conducting camera work to assist different types of examinations, supporting doctor–patient relationship creation and maintenance, allowing doctors to maintain control over the appointment, as well as protecting patients’ and doctors’ privacy. This suggests the need to create designs that can support particular workflows, relationship building, safety and privacy protection, and camera work for varying contexts.

A growing area of human-robot interaction explores how robots, for example as companions, can be used to help people manage loneliness. However, we do not yet have research results indicating if people are ready to accept companion robots in their daily lives, and thus if companion robots can actually be successful broadly in society. We present a novel long-term in-home interaction study design that will explore how people accept these robots in their homes and how the robots impact loneliness.

Robots are increasingly becoming present in workplaces and social scenarios, where people are interacting and completing tasks with them. In this paper, we explore the importance of the physical seating arrangement or placement of the robot in relation to the human. We designed a novel collaborative human-robot task for exploring how human-robot seating arrangement may influence interaction and the person's perceptions of a robot, and present the results from a pilot and two formal experiments (total 72 participants). Drawing from proxemics literature, we compared a person sitting next to a robot to being across a table from it or beside it, with a corner between them. Our results highlight a range of impacts on participant attitudes toward the robot, as well as their behavior and interaction with it. In particular, seating arrangement impacted participant preferences for the robot, and their use of aggression or condescension during disagreements with it. Our results highlight the importance of seating arrangements for collaborative human-robot teams.

Robots that interact with children are becoming more common in places such as child care and hospital environments. While such robots may mistakenly provide nonsensical information, or have mechanical malfunctions, we know little of how these robot errors are perceived by children, and how they impact trust. This is particularly important when robots provide children with information or instructions, such as in education or health care. Drawing inspiration from established psychology literature investigating how children trust entities who teach or provide them with information (informants), we designed and conducted an experiment to examine how robot errors affect how young children (3-5 years old) trust robots. Our results suggest that children utilize their understanding of people to develop their perceptions of robots, and use this to determine how to interact with robots. Specifically, we found that children developed their trust model of a robot based on the robot's previous errors, similar to how they would for a person. We however failed to replicate other prior findings with robots. Our results provide insight into how children as young as 3 years old might perceive robot errors and develop trust.

We investigated interactive agents using subliminal priming - the act of exposing a person to stimuli that they may not consciously notice, but are still processed subliminally in their mind - in an attempt to shape a person's mood and behavior. We present an overview of the psychology of subliminal priming from the perspective of how it applies to human-agent interaction, including a discussion of the potential ethical and practical implications. We further present the results from two exploratory studies (one in-lab, one crowdsourced) that present potential subliminal-priming interfaces. Our results suggest that subliminal priming may impact how participants perceive an agent and how much they enjoy a task, but we failed to find any effect of priming on participant mood or agent persuasiveness. This work aims to raise awareness of the dangers of subliminal methods of priming and contributes to the discussion on the ethics of social agents.

Feature-rich software applications offer users hundreds of commands, yet most people use only a very small fraction of the available command set. Command recommenders aim to increase awareness of an application's capabilities by generating personalized recommendations for new commands. A primary distinguishing characteristic of these recommenders concerns the manner in which they determine command relevance. Social approaches do so by analyzing community usage logs, whereas, task-based approaches mine web documentation for logical command clusters. Through a qualitative study with sixteen participants, in this work we explored user attitudes towards these different approaches and the supplemental information they enable.

We investigated obedience to an authoritative robot and asked experiment participants to do a task they would rather not do. Obedience questions are increasingly important as robots participate in tasks where they give people directions. We conducted a series of HRI obedience experiments, comparing a robotic authority to other authority instances, including: (i) a human, (ii) a remote-controlled robot, and (iii) robots of variant embodiments. The results suggest that half of participants will continue to perform a tedious task under the direction of a robot, even after expressing desire to stop. Further, we failed to find an effect of robot embodiment and perceived autonomy on obedience. Instead, the robot's perceived authority status may be more strongly correlated to obedience.

In designing and evaluating human-robot interactions and interfaces, researchers often use a simulated robot due to the high cost of robots and time required to program them. However, it is important to consider how interaction with a simulated robot differs from a real robot; that is, do simulated robots provide authentic interaction? We contribute to a growing body of work that explores this question and maps out simulated-versus-real differences, by explicitly investigating empathy: how people empathize with a physical or simulated robot when something bad happens to it. Our results suggest that people may empathize more with a physical robot than a simulated one, a finding that has important implications on the generalizability and applicability of simulated HRI work. Empathy is particularly relevant to social HRI and is integral to, for example, companion and care robots. Our contribution additionally includes an original and reproducible HRI experimental design to induce empathy toward robots in laboratory settings, and an experimentally validated empathy-measuring instrument from psychology for use with HRI.