Designing Robots for Families: In-Situ Prototyping for Contextual Reminders on Family Routines

The sense of family connectedness may support positive outcomes including individual well-being, resilience, and healthy family functioning. However, as technologies advance, they often replace human-human interactions instead of nurturing them. In this work, we investigate how robot-facilitated communication tools might instead create new opportunities for family connection. We conducted two studies with families with children aged 5-12. We first explored the design space through in-home technology probe sessions with six families. These probes inspired us to explore two key interaction design dimensions: the robot's behavior strategy (passive, reactive, proactive) and the mode of communication (synchronous, asynchronous). We then conducted a laboratory study with 20 families to examine how the two dimensions shaped parent-child interaction and connection. Our findings characterize how parents and children appropriated robot-mediated exchanges, the tensions they experienced around initiative, timing, and privacy, and the opportunities they envisioned for supporting everyday connectedness.

Family-school partnerships (FSP) are critical to children's development, yet families often face barriers such as time constraints, fragmented communication, and limited opportunities for meaningful engagement. As a step toward facilitating broader family-school partnerships, we explore a novel approach that integrates a social robot into family settings, specifically supporting home-based activities. Through interviews and co-design sessions, we designed and developed a robotic system informed by both parents and children, that supported, among other interactions, family communication about school topics. We evaluated the robot in a week-long, in-home study with 10 families. Our findings show how families integrated the robot into daily life, how parental facilitation styles shaped use, and how families perceived both the helpfulness and challenges of the robot. We contribute empirical insights, a modular system, and design implications for family- and child-robot interactions. We discuss ethical and privacy considerations, and broaden the design space for technologies supporting family-school partnerships.

Household robots boasting mobility, more sophisticated sensors, and powerful processing models have become increasingly prevalent in the commercial market. However, these features may expose users to unwanted privacy risks, including unsolicited data collection and unauthorized data sharing. While security and privacy researchers thus far have explored people's privacy concerns around household robots, literature investigating people's preferred privacy designs and mitigation strategies is still limited. Additionally, the existing literature has not yet accounted for multi-user perspectives on privacy design and household robots. We aimed to fill this gap by conducting in-person participatory design sessions with 15 households to explore how they would design a privacy-aware household robot based on their concerns and expectations. We found that participants did not trust that robots, or their respective manufacturers, would respect the data privacy of household members or operate in a multi-user ecosystem without jeopardizing users' personal data. Based on these concerns, they generated designs that gave them authority over their data, contained accessible controls and notification systems, and could be customized and tailored to suit the needs and preferences of each user over time. We synthesize our findings into actionable design recommendations for robot manufacturers and developers.