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1. Toward Integrating Care Robots into Senior Living Facilities

   Stegner, Laura Margaret (May 2025, ProQuest)

   Nations around the world are struggling with challenges related to an increasingly aging population coupled with a growing shortage of caregivers. Intelligent, interactive systems such as robots show great promise in helping to address this care crisis. While a wealth of research exists targeting various healthcare needs, the majority of this work focuses on short-term interactions between the care recipient and the technology and do not fully consider how care robots fit into the broader scope of day-to-day life in the facility. For the long-term, sustained use of technology to support care, we need to consider how the technology fits into the broader ecosystem, considering questions such as: who is managing it? how does it alter existing workflows and routines? what extra resources (especially time) are required? Broadening technology design to encompass these ecological aspects is necessary, but it presents a rich set of challenges for robots and other intelligent systems, such as many stakeholders with different priorities and needs, safety constraints, and highly dynamic environments. Especially considering the critical role of human relationships in care, it is imperative to develop effective ways for intelligent systems to support healthcare practices rather than replace invaluable human contact. The goal of this dissertation is to help integrate robots into senior living facilities by considering how stakeholders such as caregivers and older adults can make use of autonomous robot capabilities to support their needs. To achieve this end, I present a design journey toward understanding how end-user development can support the care ecosystem and facilitate care robot integration. In this dissertation, I first present two design studies to build a case for end-user development and identify key design requirements. Building on this design work, I then present the design and evaluation of the CareAssist system an an exemplar end-user development tool that shows promise in helping to facilitate care robot integration. Overall, I do not suggest that end-user development is the only solution, and instead show that it is a critical component of the broader vision of safe, effective care robots. 

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2. Towards an Understanding of Physical vs Virtual Robot Appendage Design

   Han, Zhao; Phan, Albert; Castro, Amia; Sandoval Garza, Fernando; Williams, Tom (January 2022, International Workshop on Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality for Human-Robot Interaction)

   Augmented Reality (AR) or Mixed Reality (MR) enables innovative interactions by overlaying virtual imagery over the physical world. For roboticists, this creates new opportunities to apply proven non-verbal interaction patterns, like gesture, to physically-limited robots. However, a wealth of HRI research has demonstrated that there are real benefits to physical embodiment (compared, e.g., to virtual robots displayed on screens). This suggests that AR augmentation of virtual robot parts could lead to similar challenges. In this work, we present the design of an experiment to objectively and subjectively compare the use of AR and physical arms for deictic gesture, in AR and physical task environments. Our future results will inform robot designers choosing between the use of physical and virtual arms, and provide new nuanced understanding of the use of mixed-reality technologies in HRI contexts. Index T 

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3. Family Theories in Child-Robot Interactions: Understanding Families as a Whole for Child-Robot Interaction Design

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3585088.3589386  

   Cagiltay, Bengisu; Mutlu, Bilge; Kerr, Margaret L (June 2023, IDC '23: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference)

   In this work, we discuss a theoretically motivated family-centered design approach for child-robot interactions, adapted by Family Systems Theory (FST) and Family Ecological Model (FEM). Long-term engagement and acceptance of robots in the home is influenced by factors that surround the child and the family, such as child-sibling-parent relationships and family routines, rituals, and values. A family-centered approach to interaction design is essential when developing in-home technology for children, especially for social agents like robots with which they can form connections and relationships. We review related literature in family theories and connect it with child-robot interaction and child-computer interaction research. We present two case studies that exemplify how family theories, FST and FEM, can inform the integration of robots into homes, particularly research into child-robot and family-robot interaction. Finally, we pose five overarching recommendations for a family-centered design approach in child-robot interactions. 

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4. Considerations for End-User Development in the Caregiving Domain

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaaiss.v2i1.27725  

   Stegner, Laura; Porfirio, David; Roberts, Mark; Hiatt, Laura M (January 2024, Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series)

   As service robots become more capable of autonomous behaviors, it becomes increasingly important to consider how people will be able to communicate with a robot about what task it should perform and how to do the task. There has been a rise in attention to end-user development (EUD), where researchers create interfaces that enable non-roboticist end users to script tasks for autonomous robots to perform. Currently, state-of-the-art interfaces are largely constrained, often through simplified domains or restrictive end-user interaction. Motivated by our past qualitative design work exploring how to integrate a care robot in an assisted living community, we discuss challenges of EUD in this complex domain. One set of challenges stems from different user-facing representations, e.g., certain tasks may lend themselves better to a rule-based trigger-action representations, whereas other tasks may be easier to specify via a sequence of actions. The other stems from considering the needs of multiple stakeholders, e.g., caregivers and residents of the facility may all create tasks for the robot, but the robot may not be able to share information about all tasks with all residents due to privacy concerns. We present scenarios that illustrate these challenges and also discuss possible solutions. 

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5. Computer-Mediated Sharing Circles for Intersectional Peer Support with Home Care Workers

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3579472  

   Poon, Anthony; Luebke, Matthew; Loughman, Julia; Lee, Ann; Guerrero, Lourdes; Sterling, Madeline; Dell, Nicola (April 2023, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Home care workers (HCWs) provide essential care in patients' homes but are often underappreciated and work in stressful and isolated environments with diverse and intersecting support needs. This paper describes a computer-mediated peer support program that centers around sharing circles: spaces for personal, narrative storytelling to encourage HCWs to collaboratively reflect on their home care experiences and build rapport and shared identity with their peers. We describe the design of this program and a 12-week deployment that we conducted to evaluate the program with 42 HCWs in New York City. Our findings show that participants engaged in multiple types of peer support including emotional validation, learning how to navigate the workplace and patient care, defining and enabling good home care praxis, and building understanding around purpose and identity as HCWs. We discuss how these findings inform the design of technology and use of holistic pedagogies, such as storytelling, to enable this support in computer-mediated peer support programs. Such programs can help researchers and practitioners interested in addressing diverse needs that occur in intersectional contexts, such as that of HCWs and other marginalized populations. 

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