Assessing User Experience with Piezoresistive Force Sensors: Interpreting Button Press Impulse and Duration

Abstract

As robotic systems become increasingly integrated into daily life, the need for user experience (UX) assessment methods that are both privacy-conscious and suitable for embedded hardware platforms has grown. Traditional UX evaluations relying on vision, audio, or lengthy questionnaires are often intrusive, computationally demanding, or impractical for low-power devices. In this study, we introduce a novel sensor-based method for assessing UX through direct physical interaction. We designed a robot lamp with a force-sensing button interface and conducted a user study involving controlled robot errors. Participants interacted with the lamp during a reading task and rated their UX on a 7-point Likert scale. Using force and time data from button presses, we correlated force and time data to user experience and demographic information. Our results demonstrate the potential of bodily interaction metrics as a viable alternative for UX assessment in human-robot interaction, enabling real-time, embedded, and privacy-aware evaluation of user satisfaction in robotic systems.