Towards designing telepresence robot navigation for people with disabilities

Purpose – The authors believe that people with cognitive and motor impairments may benefit from using of telepresence robots to engage in social activities. To date, these systems have not been designed for use by people with disabilities as the robot operators. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted two formative evaluations using a participatory action design process. First, the authors conducted a focus group (n=5) to investigate how members of the target audience would want to direct a telepresence robot in a remote environment using speech. The authors then conducted a follow-on experiment in which participants (n=12) used a telepresence robot or directed a human in a scavenger hunt task. Findings – The authors collected a corpus of 312 utterances (first hand as opposed to speculative) relating to spatial navigation. Overall, the analysis of the corpus supported several speculations put forth during the focus group. Further, it showed few statistic...