Social Technologies
Symposium
Authors: Louise Veling is a Senior Post-Doctoral Researcher with the Horizon 2020 SHAPES Project as part of the Assisted Living and Learning (ALL) Institute / Department of Engineering at Maynooth University. Rudi Villing is a Lecturer with the School of Engineering at Maynooth University, Programme Director of the BSc in Robotics & Intelligence Devices, member of the Hamilton Institute and associate director of the Assisted Living and Learning (ALL) institute.
Few people would dispute the importance of centring older people’s needs when it comes to developing assistive technologies. For assistive robots, this is even more important. As in other fields, within robotics and human-robot interaction (HRI) research, older people are often subject to stereotypical representations and ageist attitudes. Assistive robots are also still in their infancy, with few yet deployed in practice, so there is still some distance to go before robots make it out of the lab and into the real world. What they will be capable of and how they will be used is still in a process of negotiation.
Our research is being conducted in the context of SHAPES, a 4-year Horizon 2020 project to develop an integrated technology platform and assistive technologies to support long-term healthy and active ageing. Our goal is to come up with a realistic and sustainable roadmap for assistive robotics over the next five to ten years, which can be used by researchers, policy makers, and robot vendors. This means, as well as mapping out technological developments and strategic objectives, making sure that it is based on older people’s real needs. However, how exactly to translate the complex, contextual and holistic experiences of older adults into the abstract categories needed for solutions building is still very much an open question. Part of developing the roadmap, therefore, means addressing this.
As part of the SHAPES project, a substantial 20-month ethnographic investigation was conducted across eight European countries to understand the life-worlds of older adults, including their social, domestic, working, and financial worlds, how they move through the world, the practices of caregiving and receiving care, as well as their thoughts about the future, see (https://shapes2020.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/D2.1-Understanding-Older-People_V1.pdf). We conducted a needs analysis of this ethnography to understand needs that could be met by current or future robots and to ‘translate’ these in order to make them available and usable in a technical domain. This resulted in a set of abstracted categories and sub-categories of needs as the basis for conceptualizing, designing, and evaluating robotic and technological solutions.
There are a number of established approaches to making nuanced, qualitative data available for technology development, including use cases and personas. Use cases are written by developers to describe how the user might interact with a future system. Personas are fictional user representatives or archetypes. While both techniques have their uses, they also have drawbacks. As works of fiction, they are not necessarily based on real people’s lives, and, even when they are, they retain no traceable link to the original data. This can lead them to be difficult to interpret, misleading, and in the worst cases, may lead them to reproduce stereotypes instead of providing a true insight into people’s real lives and experiences.
To address this, we developed an approach that we call ‘authentic citations’, in which the link between the original data and resulting categories is retained and easily accessible at all stages of development. This allows designers and developers to go back and access the original ethnographic description when needed, reanimating the abstract categories. It also means that anyone with access to the authentic citations, including users, can trace the origin and motivation for a particular technological development, and validate the accuracy of the interpretation.
We can illustrate this with an example. In the excerpt below from participant ‘Bert’, we gain deep insight into the some of the impacts of a fall for an older person:
He had left his mobile phone charging upstairs out of reach and to that point had resisted wearing an alarm pendant because of the stigma associated with it. His left leg gave way and Bert didn’t have the bodily strength to pull himself up. He managed to pull a blanket off the sofa and wrapped himself in that and recalls how nobody called or came around. “I lost count of how many times I wet myself.” After three days, he knew he was close to death and vaguely recalls slowly inching his way into his hallway acquiring severe carpet burns on the way to his landline telephone where he managed to call 999 (p46)
This harrowing description shows the potentially life-threatening implications of a fall, even of the difficulty of navigating stairs. It also gives insights into the stigma people can feel in relation to assistive technologies. It reveals how the technologies in the home, in this case mobile phone and landline, did not help because they were out of reach. The additional context and nuance available in the original situated, ethnographic description would not be accessible in a use case or the fictionalised user description of a persona. In the final analysis, the authentic citation above contributed, and was linked, to a set of defined and bounded needs within the following key categories: Monitoring & feedback, Physical assistance, Personal contact, and Healthcare services & supports.
The ethnography does not just give insights into older people as frail, or the ‘deficit’ model of ageing. It also reveals older people as diverse, engaged, capable, and cool. For example Ludwig, ‘contributes to various advisory boards, is the head of committees and volunteers as a teacher at the Seniors’ Academy in Dresden. He feels comfortable in the digital world…’, while 73-year-old Kalliope from Greece, is ‘a keen gardener and cook with a passion for music … when she needs a break, she simply gets into her car and drives “until I get to my favourite bar to listen to good rock music and drink a glass of wine”’. These descriptions yielded needs under headings such as ‘Community’, ‘Culture, media & entertainment’ and ‘Teaching & learning’. Once the full text of the ethnography had been analysed for needs and categories assigned, we created a linked database of authentic citations, a mock-up of which can be seen below. This ensures that each of the themes remains connected to the original statements that produced them.
We are now beginning to develop a roadmap for robotics development that can satisfy these needs over the next five to ten years. As well as meeting user needs, this will involve analysing current robot capabilities, promising technical developments, and strategic directions in robotics research. It will also involve taking account of the political and institutional context of robotics research, including deployment contexts, such as healthcare institutions, the costs of both developing and buying these technologies, and national and international ethics and regulatory contexts. Ultimately, our aim is that the roadmap will provide a sustainable pathway for robotics development guided by real needs and contexts. By strategically focusing efforts on these needs, developers and service providers will also benefit, while meaningfully contributing to the improvement of people’s lives at all stages of their life course.
The SHAPES project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 857159.