Co-designing the Embodiment of a Minimalist Social Robot to Encourage Hand Hygiene Practises Among Children in India

Abstract

We conducted an empirical study to co-design a social robot with children to bring about long-term behavioural changes. As a case study, we focused our efforts to create a social robot to promote handwashing in community settings while adhering to minimalistic design principles. Since cultural views influence design preferences and technology acceptance, we selected forty children from different socio-economic backgrounds across India as informants for our design study. We asked the children to design paper mock-ups using pre-cut geometrical shapes to understand their mental models of such a robot. The children also shared their feedback on the eight resulting different conceptual designs of minimalistic caricatured social robots. Our findings show that children had varied expectations of the robot’s emotional intelligence, interactions, and social roles even though it was being designed for a specific context of use. The children unequivocally liked and trusted anthropomorphized caricatured designs of everyday objects for the robot’s morphology. Based on these findings, we present our recommendations for the physical and interaction features of a minimalist social robot assimilating the children’s inputs and social robot design principles grounded in prior research. Future studies will examine the children’s interactions with a built prototype.

Advancing the design of trustworthy robots for older adults in home environments: A participatory design approach

“…Other studies that reviewed trust-enhancing factors emphasized factors such as visual appearance, kinetic cues, and predictability of behavior (Xu et al, 2023). Visual qualities which tend towards anthropomorphic or infantilized features, regardless of their interactions and social roles, were observed to enhance users’ trust (Pasupuleti et al, 2023). Embedding emotional expression in design improved the robot’s trustworthiness (Song et al, 2023), and customization increased personalization influenced the users’ willingness to trust the robot (Lacroix et al, 2023).…”