Occupational exoskeletons are not yet frequently used at work. Previous research has indicated multiple factors (physiological, implementation-related, work-related, policy, and psycho-social) that can explain this lack of adoption. However, there is a lack of specific requirements related to these themes to improve exoskeletons and their adoption. Therefore, the goal of our research is to formulate concrete requirements for the design and implementation of exoskeletons. We used a design ethnography approach (focus groups, an interview, observations, surveys, and group interviews) with multiple stakeholders (users, designers, and potential future users). Our data suggest that potential future users of exoskeletons believe that existing exoskeletons should be improved to be adopted. Exoskeletons should be more comfortable to wear and flexible enough to support a wider range of tasks. We have formulated 49 requirements for occupational exoskeletons, and we validated and extended an existing framework. Our work encourages the improved design of future or existing exoskeletons.

Nowadays, off-the-shelf social robots are used more frequently by the HRI community to research social interactions with different types of users across a range of domains such as education, retail, health care, public places and other domains. Everyone doing HRI research with end-users is invited to submit a case study to our workshop. We are particularly interested in case studies where things did not go as planned. Case studies describing research in the lab or in the wild are both welcome. Examples of unplanned experiences could include, but are not limited to, unexpected responses from the user, issues with the experimental setup or simply having challenges with transferring theory to the real world. In this workshop, we focus on off-the-shelf robots. In order to generalize and compare differences across multiple HRI domains and create common solutions, we will provide a template for your case study. We are interested in learning how such unexpected HRI results can be reported. In the workshop, we will discuss and study how failures are reported and be inspired to create a list of good ways to report failures, which can hopefully be inspiring for the HRI community.

This work presents preliminary findings from a pilot study researching the complementary and similarity effect of personality of robots on children ( N=22). We aim to advance research on robot personality by using a pairwise robot comparison study, a novel method in HRI. Our findings show that the attributed gender and the voice of the robots were the main reasons given for a preference. Based on the preliminary data we hypothesize that boys have a preference for the robot with the same gender as themselves.

While its technical feasibility has been illustrated over a decade ago, today, robot-assisted telesurgery is not a part of everyday surgical practice. The thresholds for adoption of telesurgery are mostly seen as technical, legal and financial challenges. However, the aim of this paper is to understand collaboration within distributed OR teams, which seems to be under examined in research on telesurgery. By means of a proxy-technology assessment and a series of interviews, collaborative challenges for telesurgery have been identified. These include the unfamiliarity of the remote surgeon with the practices of the local operating room team and the patient. In addition, verbal and non-verbal communication have to be mediated in a telesurgery setting, making it difficult for the remote surgeon to have an overview and stay in control during surgery. With this research, we illustrate how trust issues in distributed teams manifest in OR teams in a telesurgery setting.