Co-design of Robotic Technology with Care Home Residents and Care Workers
Helena Anna Frijns, Ralf Vetter, Matthias Hirschmanner, Reinhard Grabler, Laura Vogel, Sabine Theresia Koeszegi · 2024 · Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) · doi:10.1145/3652037.3652070
Summary
This paper documents a co-design workshop series conducted at two care homes in Austria, involving 25 participants: 13 care workers (mean age 43.5) and 12 care home residents (mean age 80.6). The research question was whether introducing technology components — rather than finished robot designs — to care home stakeholders could enable them to imagine usage scenarios for robotic technology in care. The workshop series ran across three stages: an introductory stage covering admission experiences and robotic assumptions, a technology stage with dedicated workshops on computer vision and conversational AI, and a final participatory design workshop where participants developed scenarios further using structured canvases. Three parallel groups were run throughout: a mixed group of residents and care workers, a residents-only group, and a care workers-only group. Each workshop lasted approximately two hours and included explanations of technologies, creative activities (drawing, writing), and group discussions. The conversational AI workshop featured an interactive prototype built with GPT-3.5-turbo, macOS text-to-speech, and speech recognition, allowing participants to directly interact with the system. The researchers used qualitative content analysis with MAXQDA to analyze transcripts from the 13 workshops and 13 facilitator reflection discussions.
Key findings
The study revealed that care workers and residents bring complementary but sometimes conflicting perspectives to technology design. Care workers focused primarily on workflow, documentation support, safety, and procedural efficiency — their top idea was a documentation system with speech input, translation capabilities, and automatic data entry from sensors. Residents focused on personal assistance such as physical rehabilitation, reading small text, and receiving daily information. A key methodological finding was that the interactive conversational AI prototype generated the most engagement from residents, who had been less responsive to abstract drawing activities. Residents in the mixed group participated more actively than in resident-only groups, likely due to care workers encouraging participation. However, the inclusion of both groups also surfaced tensions: residents reported feeling monitored by technologies that care workers viewed positively for safety. The concept of "robotic superpowers" — focusing on what robots do well rather than mimicking human capabilities — helped participants think beyond preconceptions. Care workers shifted from skepticism to enthusiasm over the series, with one stating she went from not being able to imagine robots in care to having "so many ideas."
Relevance
This research offers valuable methodological guidance for anyone conducting participatory design with older adults or people in institutional care settings. The finding that interactive prototypes are far more effective than abstract creative activities for engaging older participants has direct implications for accessibility research and co-design processes. The study highlights important power dynamics in care settings — professional hierarchies among care workers affected participation, and the institutional context created tensions between safety-focused staff priorities and resident autonomy. For accessibility practitioners, this reinforces that co-design must account for the different and sometimes competing needs of all stakeholders in care environments. The paper also demonstrates that introducing technology at the component level rather than as finished products opens up more creative ideation, avoiding the binary accept-or-reject response that finished prototypes typically elicit from older adults.
Tags: co-design · participatory design · older adults · care homes · robotics · assistive robotics · human-robot interaction · conversational AI · computer vision · aging