Formative Analysis of Aging in Place: Implications for the Design of Caregiver Robots

摘要

Many have conceptualized caregiver robots as consumer products and studied elders’ perceived needs for and preferences about such products. For reviews, please see (Broadbent, Stafford, & MacDonald, 2009; Jones & Schmidlin, 2011). That approach, though, could create robots that cannot satisfy elders’ actual caregiving needs. Alternatively, one can conceptualize caregiver robots as workers in complex socio-technical systems. To do so, one would need a detailed account of the caregiving that takes place in elders’ homes. Unfortunately, as noted in a National Research Council (2011) report, such a detailed account of caregiving does not exist. Accordingly, we sought to develop such an account. There are many ways to analyze work (for a discussion of general approaches, see Vicente, 1999). They can be categorized into 3 general types: normative, descriptive, and formative approaches (Vicente, 1999). We adopted a formative approach because formative approaches are tailored to the analysis of complex socio-technical systems (Vicente, 1999). They capture work requirements without specifying how that work must be done or who must do it. For example, the constraint “must not lose track of time” captures a work requirement but allows the associated work to be accomplished in a number of different ways (e.g., by checking a clock, setting an alarm) and by a number of different entities (e.g., family member, caregiver robot).