@inproceedings{marchetti_pet-robot_2022, Author = {Marchetti, Emanuela and Grimme, Sophie and Hornecker, Eva and Kollakidou, Avgi and Graf, Philipp}, Title = {Pet-Robot or Appliance? Care Home Residents with Dementia Respond to a Zoomorphic Floor Washing Robot}, Year = {2022}, Pages = {1-21}, Publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, Series = {CHI '22}, Booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems}, Doi = {10.1145/3491102.3517463}, type = {inproceedings}, Abstract = {Any active entity that shares space with people is interpreted as a social actor. Based on this notion, we explore how robots that integrate functional utility with a social role and character can integrate meaningfully into daily practice. Informed by interviews and observations, we designed a zoomorphic floor cleaning robot which playfully interacts with care home residents affected by dementia. A field study shows that playful interaction can facilitate the introduction of utilitarian robots in care homes, being nonthreatening and easy to make sense of. Residents previously reacted with distress to a Roomba robot, but were now amused by and played with our cartoonish cat robot or simply tolerated its presence. They showed awareness of the machine-nature of the robot, even while engaging in pretend-play. A playful approach to the design of functional robots can thus explicitly conceptualize such robots as social actors in their context of use.} } @COMMENT{Bibtex file generated on }