A participatory design approach to using social robots for elderly care

TL;DR

The paper tackles how to responsibly deploy social robots for elderly care by applying participatory and embodied design. It proposes a four-stakeholder PD framework (elderly, informal caregivers, medical professionals, psychologists) and a mixed-methods toolkit—card sorting, storyboarding, semi-structured interviews, and two-stage workshops—to elicit needs, concerns, and attitudes. The approach emphasizes personalization, dignity, and autonomy, aiming to avoid top-down solutions and to produce adaptable robot-assisted interventions that fit diverse life contexts. By situating design in real-world routines and social ecosystems, the work integrates PD with embodied-design principles to inform future research, practice, and policy in elderly care robotics.

Abstract

We present our ongoing research on applying a participatory design approach to using social robots for elderly care. Our approach involves four different groups of stakeholders: the elderly, (non-professional) caregivers, medical professionals, and psychologists. We focus on card sorting and storyboarding techniques to elicit the concerns of the stakeholders towards deploying social robots for elderly care. This is followed by semi-structured interviews to assess their attitudes towards social robots individually. Then we are conducting two-stage workshops with different elderly groups to understand how to engage them with the technology and to identify the challenges in this task.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Four co-designing Groups in Card Sorting and Storyboards
• Figure 2: Examples of the results of each stage of the workshop
• Figure 3: Divergent & Convergent Stages for Part 1: Elderly Focus
• Figure 4: Divergent & Convergent Stages for Part 2: Technology Focus