• Corpus ID: 246863904

Judging a socially assistive robot (SAR) by its cover; The effect of body structure, outline, and color on users' perception

@article{LibermanPincu2022JudgingAS,
  title={Judging a socially assistive robot (SAR) by its cover; The effect of body structure, outline, and color on users' perception},
  author={Ela Liberman-Pincu and Yisrael Parmet and Tal Oron-Gilad},
  journal={ArXiv},
  year={2022},
  volume={abs/2202.07614}
}

• Ela Liberman-Pincu, Y. Parmet, Tal Oron-Gilad
• Published 15 February 2022
• Business
• ArXiv

Socially assistive robots (SARs) aim to provide assistance through social interaction. Previous studies contributed to understanding users` perceptions and preferences regarding existing commercially available SARs. Yet, very few studies regarding SARs' appearance used designated SAR designs, and even fewer evaluated isolated visual qualities (VQ). In this work, we aim to assess the effect of isolated VQs systematically. To achieve this, we first conducted market research and deconstructed the VQs attributed to SARs. Then, a reconstruction of body structure, outline, and color scheme was done, resulting in the creation of 30 new SAR models that differ in their VQs, allowing us to isolate one character at a time. We used these new designs to evaluate users' preferences and perceptions in two empirical studies. Our empirical findings link VQs with perceptions of SAR characteristics. These can lead to forming guidelines for the industrial design processes of new SARs to match user expectations. This paper presents an evaluation of the effect of three basic VQs: body structure, outline, and color on users' perception of the SAR's characteristics. Based on SARs market research and three preliminary studies, we created our own self-designed 30 SARs models using CAD software. These designs share most of their visual features (the same height, screen dimension and orientation, and wheels dimensions and location) and are divided by their body structure, outline, and color scheme. This allowed us to evaluate the effect of each isolated VQ using online questionnaires. empirical findings how isolated impact people's perception of a robot's characteristics: threatening, The results imply affect results.