Published papers

A variety of healthcare robots for elderly care have been developed. However, as the elderly and caregivers experience psychological resistance towards not only new technologies but specifically to robots, the adoption of healthcare robots has scarcely progressed. This article aims to develop a service design method, which consists of a design process including design tools to identify jobs in an elderly care facility and to reveal what kinds of jobs to assign to service robots and to caregivers. This article develops a design method which is composed of six steps and adopts original design tools to identify jobs needed in elderly care facilities and assign them to human and non-human actors, including service robots. The tools include an actor map to visualize the Actor to Actor (A2A) network, a current jobs to be done (JTBD) worksheet to visualize existing jobs, a new JTBD worksheet to visualize new jobs, and an actor worksheet to summa-rize information about each actor including their philosophy. With this design method, we conducted a series of workshops with the aim to develop a service fulfilled by humans and non-humans at an elderly care facility in Shizuoka prefecture in Japan. The results of questionnaires administered to the workshop participants demonstrated the effectiveness of all the tools except the new JTBD worksheet. Also, the results of interviews with employees in the elderly care facility indicated the effectiveness of the approach, which reveals visible and invisible regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive elements through interviews with human actors, and embeds them in the service design process. The design method including the original design tools proposed in this article contribute to a service design method for the use of robots in elderly care facilities by allocating jobs to human actors and non-human actors appropriately, and it also contributes to the issue of psychological resistance to the adoption of service robots in these facilities, which brings efficiencies to society. The contribution of this article is to reframe the issue of resistance to the adoption of service robots in elderly care facilities to the issue of what kinds of jobs in an elderly care facility should be assigned to service robots or caregivers, and the development of a service design process including original design tools.

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human-like characteristics to non-human or inanimate agents. There is little discussion of incorporating anthropomorphic forms in science museums as a popular learning destination. Based on this opportunity and previous research, we designed an AR game featuring anthropomorphized companions in a science museum. This work-in-progress paper explains the design concept of ‘The Adventure in Science Museum’ development, provides a run-down of the early prototype, and discusses the preliminary results of user testing in one of the science museums in Japan. Preliminary results from user testing (n=13) showed that anthropomorphized virtual companions in the science museum were perceived as cute and exciting, and they were able to present science explanations in simple and immersive ways through their conversations with players and other companions.

We have developed a multi-user pointing system for embodied appreciation in VR Theater. The purpose of this research is to promote museum visitors' deep understanding about cultural properties by embodied appreciation. Through this system, visitors can point out their interest on the screen to get further information. We performed experiments in Toppan VR Theater and analyzed the visitors' behaviors. Then we confirmed that it is possible to foster interaction between not only the visitors but also the visitors and the docent who guides the VR contents using our proposed system.