Emotive Design Heuristics: A Methodology for Creating and Validating Empathetic Design Heuristics for Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

Design of emotional interaction between AI-based technologies and humans will be key to their successful deployment and implementation in a wide range of domains and real-world applications. Empathetic design focuses on the development of systems and technologies to which humans can connect and empathize with. In this research we have generated a novel methodology for developing evidence-based, empathetic design heuristics that can be applied by designers and evaluators of human-robot interaction and conversational AI agents in order to guide in their design and evaluation. The objective is to maximize effective and positive emotive response by humans in their interaction with robots and related AI technologies. The methodology described involves a number of steps, beginning with consideration of the evidence-based published literature on human-robot empathetic design. This was followed by an expert panel extracting a set of design heuristics from the reviewed literature, with several rounds of heuristic development and subsequent validation of the resultant emotive design heuristics by an expert panel. Implications for the design and evaluation of social robots in healthcare are discussed.

Keywords: Emotive Design, Empathy, Human-robot Interaction, Usability, Human Factors, Heuristics

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007678