What is it about?
Over 1.8 million Americans need assistance eating. Robot-assisted feeding has emerged as a promising way to empower people with motor impairments to feed themselves. However, to date most robot-assisted feeding systems have been developed and tested under the assumption that they will be used in individual--not social--dining contexts. This humorous video highlights several ways in which a robot-assisted feeding system developed for individual contexts may fail in social contexts.
Featured Image
Photo by Rock'n Roll Monkey on Unsplash
Why is it important?
People with motor impairments face significant challenges during social dining, so much so that some either don’t participate in social dining or barely eat at all in social settings. Our participants have mentioned that robot-assisted feeding systems can alleviate some of these challenges, to promote a positive social dining experience (see Resources). However, to-date many of the implicit assumptions made when designing robot-assisted feeding systems have assumed they will be used in quiet, individual dining contexts. This video is important because it brings awareness to what can go wrong when a robot developed for individual settings is deployed in social settings.
Perspectives
In robotics, we often develop technologies that work well in a lab setting, without considering the nuanced, dynamic social environments they will be used in. This work serves as a call-to-action to incorporate considerations of social context throughout the design and development of assistive robots.
Amal Nanavati
University of Washington
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Unintended Failures of Robot-Assisted Feeding in Social Contexts, March 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3568294.3580209.
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Resources
Contributors
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