Telepresence Robot's Salutations to Trigger Informal Conversation with Teleworkers

ABSTRACT

Surveys show that teleworkers tend to feel isolated due to the lack of informal communication. To solve this problem, we propose a telepresence robot system that triggers informal communication. Drawing on Kendon's finding of greeting structure prior to interaction, we propose a system that presents two salutations, distance salutation and close salutation. Our experiment with a prototype system suggests that the proposed method is effective in inducing informal communication over the distance.

References

1. Tammy D. Allen, Timothy D. Golden, and Kristen M. Shockley. 2015. How Effective Is Telecommuting? Assessing the Status of Our Scientific Findings. Psychological science in the public interest?: a journal of the American Psychological Society 16, 2: 40--68.
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3. Brandon Heenan, Saul Greenberg, Setareh Aghel-Manesh, and Ehud Sharlin. 2014. Designing social greetings in human robot interaction. Proc. DIS '14, ACM Press, 855--864.
4. Adam. Kendon. 1990. Conducting interaction?: patterns of behavior in focused encounters. Cambridge University Press.
5. Kubi Telepresence -- Kubi makes video conferencing simpler and more engaging in Telemedicine, Distance Learning, and Business. Retrieved February 13, 2018 from https://www.revolverobotics.com/.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing

    • Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms

      • Computer supported cooperative work