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Designing Robots to Help Women

Martin Cooney, Lena Klasén, Fernando Alonso-Fernandez

TL;DR

This work addresses the underrepresentation of women in robotics by framing feminist HRI as a design problem and using speculative prototyping to map challenges and opportunities in crime, health, and daily activities. It introduces five sketches (Nazar, Hero, Midwife, Allo, Equa-skeleton) to illustrate how robots could deter crime, support health, and ease everyday tasks for women. A proof-of-concept drone prototype demonstrates hidden-camera detection using RGB and thermal sensing, achieving an average IoU of $0.401$ and an accuracy of $80\%$, illustrating both feasibility and current limitations of automated safety interventions. The study aims to spark discussion and guide responsible design toward a safer, more inclusive future, while calling for broader validation, governance considerations, and safeguards against misuse.

Abstract

Robots are being designed to help people in an increasing variety of settings--but seemingly little attention has been given so far to the specific needs of women, who represent roughly half of the world's population but are highly underrepresented in robotics. Here we used a speculative prototyping approach to explore this expansive design space: First, we identified some potential challenges of interest, including crimes and illnesses that disproportionately affect women, as well as potential opportunities for designers, which were visualized in five sketches. Then, one of the sketched scenarios was further explored by developing a prototype, of a robotic helper drone equipped with computer vision to detect hidden cameras that could be used to spy on women. While object detection introduced some errors, hidden cameras were identified with a reasonable accuracy of 80% (Intersection over Union (IoU) score: 0.40). Our aim is that the identified challenges and opportunities could help spark discussion and inspire designers, toward realizing a safer, more inclusive future through responsible use of technology.

Designing Robots to Help Women

TL;DR

This work addresses the underrepresentation of women in robotics by framing feminist HRI as a design problem and using speculative prototyping to map challenges and opportunities in crime, health, and daily activities. It introduces five sketches (Nazar, Hero, Midwife, Allo, Equa-skeleton) to illustrate how robots could deter crime, support health, and ease everyday tasks for women. A proof-of-concept drone prototype demonstrates hidden-camera detection using RGB and thermal sensing, achieving an average IoU of and an accuracy of , illustrating both feasibility and current limitations of automated safety interventions. The study aims to spark discussion and guide responsible design toward a safer, more inclusive future, while calling for broader validation, governance considerations, and safeguards against misuse.

Abstract

Robots are being designed to help people in an increasing variety of settings--but seemingly little attention has been given so far to the specific needs of women, who represent roughly half of the world's population but are highly underrepresented in robotics. Here we used a speculative prototyping approach to explore this expansive design space: First, we identified some potential challenges of interest, including crimes and illnesses that disproportionately affect women, as well as potential opportunities for designers, which were visualized in five sketches. Then, one of the sketched scenarios was further explored by developing a prototype, of a robotic helper drone equipped with computer vision to detect hidden cameras that could be used to spy on women. While object detection introduced some errors, hidden cameras were identified with a reasonable accuracy of 80% (Intersection over Union (IoU) score: 0.40). Our aim is that the identified challenges and opportunities could help spark discussion and inspire designers, toward realizing a safer, more inclusive future through responsible use of technology.
Paper Structure (16 sections, 4 figures)

This paper contains 16 sections, 4 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. INTRODUCTION
  2. RELATED WORK
  3. SPECULATION
  4. Challenges Faced by Women
  5. Crimes
  6. Health Challenges
  7. Other Day-to-Day Challenges
  8. How Robots Could Help Women
  9. Robots Helping to Fight Crime
  10. Robots Helping to Support Health
  11. Robots Helping with Other Day-to-Day Challenges
  12. Sketches
  13. PROTOTYPE
  14. DISCUSSION
  15. Reflections on the Prototype
  16. ...and 1 more sections

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: Basic concept: robots could be designed to help women with challenges related to crime, health, and daily activities
  • Figure 2: Sketches: (a) Nazar - A helpful flying "eye" could sense "evil" such as hidden cameras located in high-up or hard-to-see places for women seeking privacy, (b) Hero - A robotic barrier could seek to ensure that people intending harm cannot enter a woman's personal space in dangerous places, (c) Midwife - A helper robot could seek to maintain good living conditions for pregnant women, (d) Allo - A robotic baby carriage could help mothers by taking care of repetitive child raising tasks, (e) Equa-skeleton - Exoskeletons could create equal conditions for working women
  • Figure 3: Prototype concept: a drone could check a room for hidden cameras
  • Figure 4: Image Processing: (a-b) raw RGB and thermal images, (c-d) intermediate output from YOLO and threshold on thermal traces, (e-f) comparison of overall ground truth on the left--where purple boxes with red asterisks are the target, and distractor objects are labelled in other colors--with the system output on the right in green (ground truth for target objects repeated in blue)