ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Robot. AI
Sec. Biomedical Robotics
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frobt.2025.1648737
This article is part of the Research TopicInteractive Robots for Healthcare and ParticipationView all 7 articles
An In-situ Participatory Approach for Assistive Robots: Methodology and Implementation in a Healthcare Setting
Provisionally accepted- 1PAL Robotics, Barcelona, Spain
- 2Institut d'Investigacio en Intelligencia Artificial, Bellaterra, Spain
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This paper presents a participatory design approach for developing assistive robots, addressing the critical gap between designing robotic applications and real-world user needs. Traditional design methodologies often fail to capture authentic requirements due to users' limited familiarity with robotic technologies and the disconnection between design activities and actual deployment contexts. We propose a methodology centred on iterative in-situ co-design, where stakeholders collaborate with researchers using functional low-fidelity prototypes within the actual environment of use. Our approach comprises three phases: observation and inspiration, in-situ co-design through prototyping, which is the core of the methodology, and longitudinal evaluation. We implemented this methodology over 10 months at an intermediate healthcare centre. The process involved healthcare staff in defining functionality, designing interactions, and refining system behaviour through hands-on experience with teleoperated prototypes. The resulting autonomous patrolling robot operated continuously across a two-month deployment. The evaluation through questionnaires on usability, usage and understanding of the robotic system, along with open-ended questions revealed diverse user adoption patterns, with five distinct personas emerging: enthusiastic high-adopter, disillusioned high-adopter, unconvinced mid-adopter, satisfied mid-adopter and non-adopter, which are discussed in detail. During the final evaluation deployment, user feedback still identified both new needs and practical improvements, as co-design iterations have the potential to continue indefinitely. Moreover, despite some performance issues, the robot's presence seemed to generate a placebo effect on both staff and patients, while it appears that staff's behaviours were also influenced by the regular observation of the researchers. The obtained results prove valuable insights into long-term human-robot interaction dynamics, highlighting the importance of context-based requirements gathering.
Keywords: human-robot interaction, Participatory Design, In-situ Co-design, Assistive Robots, longitudinal study, In-the-wild study
Received: 17 Jun 2025; Accepted: 29 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gebelli and Ros. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ferran Gebelli, ferran.gebelli@pal-robotics.com
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.