Implications from Responsible Human-Robot Interaction with Anthropomorphic Service Robots for Design Science

Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, anthropomorphic service robots are continuously penetrating various domains of our daily lives. With this development, the urge for an interdisciplinary approach to responsibly design human-robot interaction (HRI), with particular attention to human dignity, privacy, compliance, and transparency, increases. This paper contributes to design science, in developing a new artifact, i.e., an interdisciplinary framework for designing responsible HRI with anthropomorphic service robots, which covers the three design science research cycles. Furthermore, we propose a multi-method approach by applying this interdisciplinary framework. Thereby, our finding offer implications for designing HRI in a responsible manner

Regulating Mobile Mental Health Apps

Mobile medical apps (MMAs) are a fast‐growing category of software typically installed on personal smartphones and wearable devices. A subset of MMAs are aimed at helping consumers identify mental states and/or mental illnesses. Although this is a fledgling domain, there are already enough extant mental health MMAs both to suggest a typology and to detail some of the regulatory issues they pose. As to the former, the current generation of apps includes those that facilitate self‐assessment or self‐help, connect patients with online support groups, connect patients with therapists, or predict mental health issues. Regulatory concerns with these apps include their quality, safety, and data protection. Unfortunately, the regulatory frameworks that apply have failed to provide coherent risk‐assessment models. As a result, prudent providers will need to progress with caution when it comes to recommending apps to patients or relying on app‐generated data to guide treatment

A Sociable Humanoid Autonomous Robotic Platform (the SHARP Project): An evaluation of the G.E.N.E.S.I.S. robot as an interactive consumer robotic platform

The Social Humanoid Autonomous Robotic Platform (SHARP) project is an android project that was created with the intent of making learning about androids and robotics easier for the novice, diverse for the expert, educational in the classroom, and useful in the home or business. The project centers itself on its simplicity, low cost, and expandability. This paper illustrates how the SHARP Project has the potential to be an affordable fit in nearly every modern setting. The introduction of the SHARP project lays the groundwork for people of many ages, incomes, and educational levels to take advantage of robotics technology. The SHARP project features research based, in part, on a personal android project named G.E.N.E.S.I.S. as an example of the SHARP project\u27s features. The features of G.E.N.E.S.I.S. include voice recognition, speech synthesis, and responses to various sensor stimuli which help encourage human-robot interaction. This study uses survey results to examine the factors that make these robots desirable to consumers and identifies which factors make some robots more sociable than others. The study concludes with an evaluation of the G.E.N.E.S.I.S. robotic platform and suggests an appropriate market niche for this and other similar sociable humanoid robotic platforms

Humanoid and android robots in the imaginary of adolescents, young adults and seniors

This paper investigates effects of participants’ gender and age (adolescents, young adults, and seniors), robots’ gender (male and female robots) and appearance (humanoid vs android) on robots’ acceptance dimensions. The study involved 6 differently aged groups of participants (two adolescents, two young adults and two seniors’ groups, for a total of 240 participants) requested to express their willingness to interact and their perception of robots’ usefulness, pleasantness, appeal, and engagement for two different sets of females (Pepper, Erica, and Sophia) and male (Romeo, Albert, and Yuri) humanoid and android robots. Participants were also requested to express their preferred and attributed age ranges and occupations they entrusted to robots among healthcare, housework, protection and security and front office. Results show that neither the age nor participants and robots’ gender, nor robots’ human likeness univocally affected robots’ acceptance by these differently aged users. Robots’ acceptance appeared to be a nonlinear combination of all these factors

Robotics Technology in Mental Health Care

This chapter discusses the existing and future use of robotics and intelligent sensing technology in mental health care. While the use of this technology is nascent in mental health care, it represents a potentially useful tool in the practitioner's toolbox. The goal of this chapter is to provide a brief overview of the field, discuss the recent use of robotics technology in mental health care practice, explore some of the design issues and ethical issues of using robots in this space, and finally to explore the potential of emerging technology

Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume. Volume 2

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume 2

Robotic Faces: Exploring Dynamical Patterns of Social Interaction between Humans and Robots

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Informatics, 2015The purpose of this dissertation is two-fold: 1) to develop an empirically-based design for an interactive robotic face, and 2) to understand how dynamical aspects of social interaction may be leveraged to design better interactive technologies and/or further our understanding of social cognition. Understanding the role that dynamics plays in social cognition is a challenging problem. This is particularly true in studying cognition via human-robot interaction, which entails both the natural social cognition of the human and the “artificial intelligence” of the robot. Clearly, humans who are interacting with other humans (or even other mammals such as dogs) are cognizant of the social nature of the interaction – their behavior in those cases differs from that when interacting with inanimate objects such as tools. Humans (and many other animals) have some awareness of “social”, some sense of other agents. However, it is not clear how or why. Social interaction patterns vary across culture, context, and individual characteristics of the human interactor. These factors are subsumed into the larger interaction system, influencing the unfolding of the system over time (i.e. the dynamics). The overarching question is whether we can figure out how to utilize factors that influence the dynamics of the social interaction in order to imbue our interactive technologies (robots, clinical AI, decision support systems, etc.) with some "awareness of social", and potentially create more natural interaction paradigms for those technologies. In this work, we explore the above questions across a range of studies, including lab-based experiments, field observations, and placing autonomous, interactive robotic faces in public spaces. We also discuss future work, how this research relates to making sense of what a robot "sees", creating data-driven models of robot social behavior, and development of robotic face personalities

Asynchrony enhances uncanniness in human, android, and virtual dynamic facial expressions

Objective: Uncanniness plays a vital role in interactions with humans and artificial agents. Previous studies have shown that uncanniness is caused by a higher sensitivity to deviation or atypicality in specialized categories, such as faces or facial expressions, marked by configural processing. We hypothesized that asynchrony, understood as a temporal deviation in facial expression, could cause uncanniness in the facial expression. We also hypothesized that the effect of asynchrony could be disrupted through inversion. Results: Sixty-four participants rated the uncanniness of synchronous or asynchronous dynamic face emotion expressions of human, android, or computer-generated (CG) actors, presented either upright or inverted. Asynchrony vs. synchrony expressions increased uncanniness for all upright expressions except for CG angry expressions. Inverted compared with upright presentations produced less evident asynchrony effects for human angry and android happy expressions. These results suggest that asynchrony can cause dynamic expressions to appear uncanny, which is related to configural processing but different across agents

Factors of Emotion and Affect in Designing Interactive Virtual Characters

The Arts: 1st Place (The Ohio State University Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum)This paper represents a review of literature concerning factors of affective interactive virtual character design. Affect and it's related concepts are defined followed by a detail of work being conducted in relevant areas such as design, animation, robotics. The intent of this review as to inform the author on overlapping concepts in fields related to affective design in order to apply these concepts interactive character development.A three-year embargo was granted for this item