Mediating relatedness for nine adolescents with ME: Reducing isolation through minimal interactions with AV1

This study from University of Oslo discusses how AV1 “designed to mediate experiences of care, social connectedness, and intimacy, was used by adolescents with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, a condition that reduces their normal functioning, including the ability to socialise. A study with nine adolescents, each using the robot for about a year in average, revealed that it was largely effective at mediating their everyday experiences of relatedness, triggering productive new habits and social practices.”

The authors “interpret these findings to propose a set of strategies for designing technologies that support relatedness while requiring minimal interactivity and engagement. Balance, extension-of-self, coolness, and acts-of-care, in addition to commonly used physicalness, expressivity and awareness, enable the robot to extend the adolescents' ability to relate to others, people and animals.”

Bibliography

Culén, A. L., Børsting, J., & Odom, W. (2019). Mediating relatedness for adolescents with ME: Reducing isolation through minimal interactions with a Robot Avatar. In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 359-371).