Proactive, Connected Spaces

With families living further apart, it has become increasingly difficult for people to stay connected -- particularly in the case of grandparents and children. The challenge lies in deciding when, how and what to engage on. Can technology act as a proactive facilitator of human-human connection?

Social robots are uniquely positioned to act as active facilitators of human-human connection. However, in order to do so, they require the ability to be proactive. Proactivity demands that an agent not only respond to it's environment, but also exhibit goal-directed behavior by taking the initiative. In this work, an ecosystem for connected social robots to utilize the surfaces of the home as a canvas for expression in order to engage grandparents and grandkids in human-human interaction is proposed.

This work models proactivity in an agent as a function of understanding the context, proposing a goal, and taking initiative through an interaction. Human studies will be conducted in order to understand and draw inspiration from human behavior to drive how a robot gets an individual's attention. Further interaction studies will serve to design and evaluate the form of expression (robot, environment, or both) most relevant for given contexts.