Companion Robot Research

Responsibility

Research, Strategy

Role

UX Researcher

Team

Independent Research

Period

2018.2.23 - 2018.2.27

OVERVIEW

I conducted a research on the topic of companion robots for elderly people. I finished this side project in 4 days, proposing 2 personas and the design strategy as my practice of several research and design tools.

INTRODUCTION

With the flame of A.I., the concept of robot agent has become famous again. I wonder whether companion robot has the possibility and ability to be used in the real world context. If the answer is yes, what will be the challenge? I set a task for myself.

The task was described as:

" Interview with three senior citizen from different families to define the persona who uses companion robots. "

CHALLENGE

The main challenge for the research is that the companion robot is considered as a future product. Little people has the experience of interacting with such of things.

RESEARCH

Desk Research

First of all, I need to understand the topic of companion robots and find out who will be the target interviewees. I searched for the most famous products and applications of companion robots in industry, and found that there are several technical issues haven't been solve so that we are still far from the scenario of really being companied by robots.

Second, based on the definition from Singapore Action Group of Elders (SAGE), senior citizen is another name for people over the age of 60. The meaning of "Senior Citizen" is expressed in happy, pleasing, casual, gaining happiness, enjoyment, and so on. Because their life are at retirement age, the troubles of raising children are gone, and intensely competitive work has been put aside, so their lives have become free and relaxed.

Also, World Health Organization proposed the framework of "Active Ageing" in 2002, which "is the process of optimizing opportunities for health, participation and security in order to enhance quality of life as people age." The word "active" refers to continuing participation in social, economic, cultural, spiritual and civic affairs, not just the ability to be physically active or to participate in the labour force. In 2025, some of the country will faces the population of one-third elderly people.

Industrial Economics and Knowledge Research Center (IEK) conducted a research to follow this topic, using "Technological Life" and "Independent Life" as their indices to distinguish different kinds of senior citizens, and divided them into four group: "Enlighteneds, Independents, Fashionables, Conservatives."

Based on the information above, I decided to use these two index to filter my interviewee and tried to figure out their thought for the "companion" and "technological life".

Recruitment

After splitting my target interviewees into two dimensions and four groups, I tried to identify the value of each group of users. The diagram shows that the "Fashionables" are the lead users, "Enlighteneds" and "Independents" are our potential users. I designed a questionnaire to map the subjects, ensuring that their experiences are as valuable as possible, and picked three of them to become my interviewees.

Contextual Inquiry

I set the goal of the interview to be understand their experiences of companion and the willingness of living technological life. Each interview was conducted at interviewee's home, and all of them are informed that I would take note and record the conversation.

After interviews, I did the affinity analysis and find out what potential users think about the topic, and find some interesting result.

The needs for companion are not only at psychological level, but also at physical level
Companionship is not just a psychological level. When you imagine your aging body, physical needs will become more prominent, and satisfying such needs will be more important than meeting psychological needs.
Mature shows no excessive dependence on companionship
Regardless of whether it is psychological or physiological, people think that when they can be independent, they are complete and mature themselves.
Trust and relaxation are the important factors that make the conversation able to meet psychological needs
The psychological needs often need to be met by communication, but the depth of communication depends on whether they trust and know each other very much to fully express themselves or not.
The difficulty of learning new technology makes them give up the possibility of enjoying the convenience brought by technology.
When there was no current technology, people still lived a good life. With the gradual decline in learning ability because of aging, it is good to learn new technologies to improve life, but it is to not learn the uncommon or unmemorable processes.

RESULT

Persona

The personas describe their goals, difficulties, and behavior. I divided their goals into three parts, including life goal, experience goal, and end goal. Life goals tell us their view and the value of life, it may be the deep motivation for doing things. Experience goals explain their expectation to the feeling when using the product. End goals describe their goal of the specific task or their expectation to what the product could do for them.

Robert Chen (Primary)
Robert is a 70 year's old retired civil servant. His life is focused on his family, and he cares about staying healthy and being safe more. He hopes his life to be as stable as possible, also he want his posterity to have a great career development.

When he interacts with the product, he expects to feel the connection with the world's trend. He wants to easily identify the things that he can or can't do.

He realizes that his health condition has been getting worse, worrying about it would be hard to manage his life by himself. Yet learning new technologies has never been easy for him since he seldom uses them and they won't change his workflow too much.

He hopes he can find someone who takes care of him, especially at the physiological level. At the same time the service should continuously send him the news and fit the his own space's planning.

Shelly Wang (Secondary)
Shelly is a financial industry manager. She is about to retired so that she has started planning for her retired life. She wants to expand her social realm. Shelly hopes she could live a life without stakes, and having more interaction with her family members but won't scarify their own space.

She hopes the product or service can create the closeness, and she can find the similarity between the product and herself. She also wants the product can customize the reaction based on her behavioral data.

Since half of the Shelly's colleague that she is familiar with has retired, also she is worrying about losing the inner sustenance, that is, her job, she wants to find things that she could invest her time on. When it comes to her family, she doesn't want them to feel the tight bind when she contact them.

Thus, it will be great if she find a warm company. In front of this company, she can sincerely show herself. Yet the most important things is still that her family can communicate between each other actively. She also hopes her home could be as tidy as possible.

To better illustrate the interaction among them, other people and information, I also list out the channels and environment. From the figures, it's easily to understand that companion exist in multiple channels, including digital or physical, and even in the digital channel there are multi-devices.

Design Strategy

Based on the research result, I proposed several design strategy to help designer understand the scope and structure of this topic. With strategy canvas, I pointed out that "Sharing Workload" and "Empathy" should become our core value, and we could try to eliminate the importance of "Being Cute" or "Being Cheap."

I also proposed the strategy for design the ecosystem, utilizing the structure of "Consistency, Continuity, and Complementarity" to explore the possibility and the vision of our future. There is possibility for multiple types of "robots," and with this kind of property, we need to think about the consistency of the experience of our products and service. With the development of the smart city and smart home, more data will be generated, and collecting users' behavior data, utilizing this data to support their different stages in the journey of life will become extremely important. Since there are various kinds of digital channel, the types of interaction will breakthrough our imagination, and control different digital products will become the first step. This can not only makes using product more easier, but also strengthen the relation between friends and families.