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Today’s teens will most likely be the first generation to spend a lifetime living and interacting with both mechanical and social robots. Although human-robot interaction has been explored in children, adults, and seniors, examination of teen-robot interaction has been minimal. Using human-centered design, our team is developing a social robot to gather stress and mood data from teens in a public high school. As part of our preliminary design stage, we conducted a interaction pilot study in the wild to explore and capture teens’ initial interactions with a lowfidelity social robot prototype. We observed strong engagement and expressions of empathy from teens during our qualitative, interaction studies.
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Public Versus Private: How Teens Perceived Teen-Robot Interactions in a School Setting
Social robots may be a promising social-emotional tool to support adolescent mental health. However, how might interactions with a social robot in a school setting be perceived by teens? From previous studies, we gathered qualitative data suggesting a design tension between teens wanting both public and private interactions with our social robot, EMAR. In our current study, we explored interactions between a social robot and a small group of adolescents in a semi-private, school library setting. We found: (1) Some teens preferred to have a friend present while they engaged with the social robot, (2) Teens found comfort in being physically visible, but audibly private during interactions, and finally (3) Strangers in the school environment were not disruptive of the teens' robot interactions, but unexpectedly friends were. After presenting these findings, we briefly discuss how these qualitative data can be situated and our next steps for further exploration.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734100
- PAR ID:
- 10386125
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 955 to 958
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/hri53351.2022.9889579
