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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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This content will become publicly available on May 1, 2026
Toward Integrating Care Robots into Senior Living Facilities
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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- Award ID(s):
- 1925043
- PAR ID:
- 10655435
- Publisher / Repository:
- ProQuest
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798283480237
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Institution:
- The University of Wisconsin - Madison
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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