Designing a Socially Assistive Robot for the Early Identification of Urinary Tract Infections

— Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs) have the potentialto lead to severe health implications if not detected andtreated promptly. The Feather project aims to develop a systemwhich will provide early identification of UTIs through regularinteractions with an individual at home. This paper utilizes aparticipatory design workshop to investigate the use of SociallyAssistive Robots (SARs) for this purpose, and understand 1)the appropriate robot embodiment, and 2) the relevant socialinteractions to identify UTI indicators. Two of the five exploredembodiments were found to facilitate a suitable balance betweenagency and autonomy for this task, with the telepresence robotcreating a preference due to a need for strong navigationcapabilities. Participants further devised a series of multimodalinteractions to identify a range of UTI indicators. These earlyinvestigatory design insights lay the groundwork for introducingSARs to this novel area of application, from which we plan tobuild upon to develop a working system.