Living with a Vacuum Cleaning Robot

Abstract

Little is known about the usage, adoption process and long-term effects of domestic service robots in people's homes. We investigated the usage, acceptance and process of adoption of a vacuum cleaning robot in nine households by means of a six month ethnographic study. Our major goals were to explore how the robot was used and integrated into daily practices, whether it was adopted in a durable way, and how it impacted its environment. We studied people's perception of the robot and how it evolved over time, kept track of daily routines, the usage patterns of cleaning tools, and social activities related to the robot. We integrated our results in an existing framework for domestic robot adoption and outlined similarities and differences to it. Finally, we identified several factors that promote or hinder the process of adopting a domestic service robot and make suggestions to further improve human-robot interactions and the design of functional home robots toward long-term acceptance.

Deploying Robots in a Production Environment: A Study on Temporal Transitions of Workers’ Experiences

“…However, the temporality of UX, i.e., how the quality of the users' experience develops over time [14], is still an area of research to be further explored [2]. As soon a new technology is deployed, acceptance becomes an issue (e.g., [10], [25]), and technology adoption is crucial. Technology adoption represents a process that ends with a user embracing a technology, i.e., accepting it [24].…”

“…Narrative interviews are open-structured qualitative interviews that aim to evoke reports of personal experiences by the participants [10]. The main task of the interviewer is to stimulate these reports by asking narrative trigger questions.…”

“…The main task of the interviewer is to stimulate these reports by asking narrative trigger questions. Meanwhile the participants are reporting their experiences, the interviewer should be mainly a listener and her/his influence on the participant's story is limited [10]. By making use of people's reports about their experience of a certain process or an event, we considered a narrative interview technique to be appropriate for accessing the experiences of workers, who are directly interacting with industrial robots.…”

“…By making use of people's reports about their experience of a certain process or an event, we considered a narrative interview technique to be appropriate for accessing the experiences of workers, who are directly interacting with industrial robots. In addition to narrative questions, Flick [10] proposes to additionally ask semantic questions, which are questions that do not trigger reports of personal experiences, but argumentations regarding the interviewee's assessments and ascriptions of meaning. These semantic questions aim at accessing additional information, which cannot be narrated, but which is nevertheless relevant (like subjective meanings).…”

Living with robots : investigating the user acceptance of social robots in domestic environments

“…Nonetheless, despite the greater attention to the hedonic factors, the utilitarian factor of usefulness seems to be a fundamental basis for engaging in long-term use with a social robot. The importance of practical utility is also stressed by Fink et al (2013), who reported that people who did not perceive the robot to be useful stopped using it after some initial trials.…”