Ameca, leave me alone! – Designing Effective Privacy Indicators for a Humanoid Robot
Celia Nieto Agraz, Susanna Marie Spoerl, Andreas Hein and Marion Koelle
As demand for home care grows, staff shortages are becoming a major challenge. Social robots supporting care workers may present a promising response. Yet, care robots come at the cost of introducing new privacy challenges. Technological safeguards alone are not sufficient to reassure users that their privacy is upheld. Thus, there is a need for effective privacy indicators, which is especially true in the context of humanoid robots, where both anthropomorphic and technological indicators are feasible. In an elicitation study (N=24) with Ameca, a state-of-the-art humanoid robot, we explored preferred privacy indicators and compared them to preferences when interacting with a human nurse. Our analysis contributes a library of preferred gestures and indicators, which we implemented and validated across four care scenarios (N=24). Our results show that privacy indicators depend on the context and modality, and that users prefer combinations of different types of signals that they find more reassuring.
2026
inbook
Association for Computing Machinery
22
PIZ
Pflegeinnovationszentrum
Pflegeinnovationszentrum
