Robots in the Wild: Understanding Long-term Use

© ACM, 2009. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in HRI '09 Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1514095.1514106It has long been recognized that novelty effects exist in the interaction with technologies. Despite this recognition, we still know little about the novelty effects associated with domestic robotic appliances and more importantly, what occurs after the novelty wears off. To address this gap, we undertook a longitudinal field study with 30 households to which we gave Roomba vacuuming robots and then observed use over six months. During this study, which spans over 149 home visits, we encountered methodological challenges in understanding households' usage patterns. In this paper we report on our longitudinal research, focusing particularly on the methods that we used 1) to understand human-robot interaction over time despite the constraints of privacy and temporality in the home, and 2) to uncover information when routines became less conscious to the participants themselves