Researchers from UX Innovation Lab at Samsung Research won the “Best Paper Award” at Human-Computer Interaction Korea 2021 with the theme “Human-Centered Design for Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS): Supporting Caregivers at Home.” The HCI Society of Korea is a group of researchers who study the theory and application of human-computer interactions (HCI). It holds yearly academic conferences where over 2,000 researchers from academia and industry participate in a mutual exchange of new interaction technologies.

Yoo-Jin Won, the first author of this study, explained, “While we have worked on Robot user experience (UX) for several years, this has been one of the most important research questions: how can we bridge the gap between robots embodied with immature levels of artificial intelligence (AI) and users’ high expectations for robots?” Unlike several AI-enabled services utilizing usage behaviors to improve their performance and functionality, most socially interactive robots (SIRs) and socially assistive robots (SARs) that debuted in the market offer only a few fixed domains of functionality and untrustworthy performance levels.

The study details the process and results of the human-centered design process of RaaS that allows caregivers to participate easily in the robots’ recognized “caregiving” activities. These include judging and suggesting promising solutions, enacting caregiving action, and evolving for the personalization process. This research was conducted in collaboration with the robot development process in the Robot Center at Samsung Research. Moreover, Samsung Bot™ Care, the result of this collaborative work, was introduced at CES 2021 and Samsung Tech Fair 2020.

UX Innovation Lab is a group of researchers who work hard on various UX outputs and related research areas to envision a new lifestyle based on AI technologies from Samsung Research.