An Assistive Robotic Table for Older and Post-Stroke Adults: Results from Participatory Design and Evaluation Activities with Clinical Staff

An inevitable new frontier for the CHI community is the development of complex, larger-scale, cyber-physical artifacts where advancements in design, computing and robotics converge. Presented here is a design exemplar: the Assistive, Robotic Table (ART), the key component of our envisioned home+ suite of networked, robotic furnishings for hospitals and homes, promoting wellbeing and independent living. We begin with the motivations for ART, and present our iterative, five-phase, participatory design-and-evaluation process involving clinicians at a rehabilitation hospital, focusing here on the final usability study. From our wide-ranging design-research activities, which may be characterized as research through design, we found ART to be promising but also challenging. As a design exemplar, ART offers invaluable lessons to the CHI community as it comes to design larger-scale, cyber-physical artifacts cultivating interactions across people and their surroundings that define places of social, cultural and psychological significance.