Exploiting ability for human adaptation to facilitate improved human-robot interaction and acceptance

This article reports findings from a usability and user experience evaluations conducted in the last 2 years of a 4-year assistive robotics research project using the Kompai robot. It focuses on the evaluations that were conducted with older adults in an assisted living studio in the United Kingdom (which was arranged as an open plan studio apartment), a UK residential care home, and an older couple's own home in the Netherlands over 2 days. It examines emergent adaptive human behaviour in human-robot interaction (HRI) to consider whether we are approaching the embodiment and functionality of service robots correctly. It discusses possible improvements that could be made at the systems level that better exploit people's natural ability to adapt and find workarounds to technologies and their limitations.