Unintended Failures of Robot-Assisted Feeding in Social Contexts

Abstract

Over 1.8 million Americans require assistance eating. Robot-assisted feeding is a promising way to empower people with motor impairments to eat independently. Yet, most robot-assisted feeding research has focused on individual dining (e.g., eating at home with a caregiver), but not social dining (e.g., family meals, friends’ brunch, romantic dates). What happens when a robot developed for individual contexts gets used in social contexts? In this humorous video, we present unintended consequences that can arise from robot-assisted feeding in social settings. This video aims to raise awareness about the importance of accounting for social context when designing assistive robots.

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nanavati2023unintended,
  title = {Unintended Failures of Robot-Assisted Feeding in Social Contexts},
  author = {Nanavati, Amal and Alves-Oliveira, Patricia and Schrenk, Tyler and Gordon, Ethan K. and Cakmak, Maya and Srinivasa, Siddhartha S.},
  year = {2023},
  month = mar,
  booktitle = {Companion of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)},
  type = {video},
  url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3568294.3580209},
  video = {https://youtu.be/02LYORrcN7M}
}