Abstract
This paper presents two survey studies conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) to explore the possible uses of the desktop social robot Haru during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first study aimed to understand participants’ preferences for Haru’s use to support remote communication with others. We found, however, that participants imagined the robot playing a much larger role in their everyday life, even living as their social companion through the uncertainty and disruption caused by COVID-19. This led us to conduct a second AMT study to further explore how participants imagined their life with Haru, and how these imaginaries related to their socio-physical distancing [SPD] practices and their perception of Haru’s use for following SPD or overcoming disruption from such distancing. Our findings present of how participants imagined Haru to help them through SPD for uses beyond remote communication and suggest how these uses map on to and extend our broader understanding of social support and companionship with robots.
Socio-physical distancing (SPD), refers to ‘Social distancing’ or ‘physical distancing,’ recommendations issued to reduce the spread of novel Coronavirus disease 2019.
Sawyer Collins and Swapna Joshi share the first authorship for this publication.
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Study 1 also collected data on design Haru robot for remote communication. However, to scope this paper, we only present findings that motivated us for Study 2.
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Joshi, S., Collins, S., Kamino, W., Gomez, R., Šabanović, S. (2020). Social Robots for Socio-Physical Distancing. In: Wagner, A.R., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12483. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62056-1_37
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