Preliminary Survey Analysis in Participatory Design: Repositioning, Transferring, and Personal Care Robots

Robotic aids can perform repositioning, transferring, and personal care tasks and increase independence of persons who have reduced motor functionality. Our goal is to develop robotic aids by actively involving the target population, their caregivers, family members, and friends early in the design process to increase user acceptability through participatory design. We conducted a survey to explore the needs for robotic aids and to evaluate the perceived pros and cons of prototypes that we have designed and built-in simulation. Topic Modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation was used to detect trends and characteristics from the open-ended survey questions. This information will help us interpret the survey responses to increase usability and acceptance when building a physical robot.