Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 5.
A picture from the first Italian test site
is slowly deteriorating. The secondary users are: their son living in Rome and their
grandchild.
We initially experienced some problems with the technical set-up of this test site.
Specifically, the typical layout of the Italian houses has created some problems due to
reduced space (particular difficulty emerged in going through doors and due to some
narrow passage in the house) to the connection to recharging station and to smoothly
move in the house. This highlighted the need to improve the mobility of the robot and
the need to provide an automated recharging functionality (see Section 4). Currently
the test site is at step S0 of the evaluation plan. Since now we can say that some robot
usability problems are emerging due to the particular fragility of the two old people who
participate in the study. Overall the old couple are very interested to the G
IRAFF
robot,
even though its use is currently still limited. Our goal is also to monitor the robot's
usage over time to assess the effect of familiarity or habituation.
Te s t S i t e s 2 .
A very active old woman living alone in Rome is the end user of our sec-
ond Italian test sites. Her grandchild and daughter are the main current secondary users.
Additionally we are also planning to involve a day care center that will connect to the
woman. Also this test site is currently at step S0 of the evaluation plan. However, some
preliminary comments can be reported. Both the lady and her grandchild are enthusi-
astic of the robot. They would also like that the robot do additional things. The lady,
as most of the elderly people interviewed, is concerned about possible costs associated
to the robots (e.g., the electricity consumption). Overall she really appreciates the pos-
sibility to stay in contact with her relatives, also relying on the video capability of the
robot. She would also appreciate a sort of service provided by the day care center that
would allow her to have a more frequent contact with a doctor or a specialist.
4
Technical Challenges for Long Term Use
The work performed for both the short term experiments and the test sites set up rein-
forced the general lesson that in order to evaluate MRP systems, an important aspect
worth to be considered is the effort needed to deploy them into real contexts. In partic-
ular, the technological set up needed to deploy the systems in real older people houses
requires quite an amount of work to be done in order to create robust contexts of use.
