JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Assistive robotics for helping older people to live well and stay independent (and other tasks) have, to date, failed to fulfil their promise: there are few assistive robots in everyday use. In part this failing can be attributed to inadequate or missing co-design activities that would ensure that the technology (and services which incorporate it) is developed with prospective end users, addressing their actual needs and wants, and not merely for them and based on lazy assumptions about heterogenous user groups. Moreover, clinical models of frailty are incomplete guides when it comes to designing assistive technologies.

Objective:

This exercise aimed to address some of these limitations by taking a “phenomenological snapshot” of what it means to be an older person in the current socio-technological context, and making this snapshot, along with the co-design materials developed, available to the wider assistive robotics community in order to provide solid foundational evidence for steering the development of assistive robotics in more productive directions.

Methods:

Two rounds of co-design workshops have been conducted with older people and their caregivers, based on an innovative methodology that used personas and speculative designs to explore sensitive everyday difficulties faced by participants and highlight some of their general wishes for and concerns about assistive robotics. The data collected during the workshops were analysed and key themes extracted.

Results:

The workshops resulted in a rich repository of aspects of the lived experience of older people and their caregivers, along with a collection of their expectations, requirements for and constraints upon domestic assistive robotics.

Conclusions:

We believe that our findings provide solid foundational evidence for the development of assistive robotics for older people. We are in the process of disseminating these results through various channels to the wider assistive robotics community; ultimately, the success of our activities will be demonstrated only through the development of acceptable, useful and viable assistive robotics for older people.