Hand rehabilitation aims to improve patients’ hand and arm skills, improve adherence to training and increase their participation in activities of daily living (ADLs). A novel way of achieving this is to employ ADL-based interactive rehabilitation tools and show patients how their improved skills can be transferable to daily tasks. Hence, in this paper, we report the results of a set of studies carried out with six healthy individuals and two physiotherapists to discover the potential of integrating ADLs into interactive hand rehabilitation tools. Consequently, we designed two interactive drinking-based concepts and tested those with three stroke patients. We found that ADL-based training couples particularly well with functional training. Still, selecting appropriate functional exercises that match the ADL is an essential task to transfer training outcomes to a functional setting. Based on our findings, this paper highlights that ADL-based interactive hand rehabilitation training must minimally deviate from the original ADLs.

To get a better understanding of people's natural responses to humanlike robots outside the lab, we analyzed commentary on online videos depicting robots of different humanlikeness and gender. We built on previous work, which compared online video commentary of moderately and highly humanlike robots with respect to valence, uncanny valley, threats, and objectification. Additionally, we took into account the robot's gender, its appearance, its societal impact, the attribution of mental states, and how people attribute human stereotypes to robots. The results are mostly in line with previous work. Overall, the findings indicate that moderately humanlike robot design may be preferable over highly humanlike robot design because it is less associated with negative attitudes and perceptions. Robot designers should therefore be cautious when designing highly humanlike and gendered robots.