Improving Post-Occupancy Evaluation Engagement Using Social Robots

Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is essential to evaluate and enhance indoor environmental quality (IEQ) that supports human health and productivity in building environments. Several POE methodical settings have been developed, such as interviews, paper-based questionnaires, and web-based surveys, for collecting sufficient and valid responses from occupants. However, these methods either need extensive preparation of human experts for interviews or have difficulties in engaging participants to get reliable responses and collect detailed feedback from open-ended questions. Considering the recent achievements of social robots in naturally interacting and communicating with humans by following social behaviors, this study introduced a new human-robot interaction (HRI) approach for collecting POE responses from building occupants. Two common types of human-robot interactions-verbal communication and haptic perception were developed based on the Misty Robot prototypes. The experimental results from a within-subject user study (N = 18) showed that participants expressed 61% (p < 0.05) more content to the descriptive open-ended questions using social robots. They also provided 87% (p < 0.01) (mean word counts) more detailed IEQ-related suggestions using social robots compared to traditional web-based questionnaires. The post-study satisfaction results also indicate that almost 90% of the participants preferred HRI-based POE over web-based POE. These findings demonstrate the potential of human-robot interaction approaches for improving POE engagement and reveal the need for further systematic characterization of social robots-based POE designs and implementations.