Social robotics and human computer interaction for promoting wellbeing in the contemporary city

Abstract

Within today’s environment of relentless urban growth, socio-technical approaches towards enhancing wellbeing within the urban have started gathering momentum. Situated in this context, the research paper presents an approach to actively instigate physiological and psychological behavioral change within people for promoting wellbeing via context aware augmentation of physical environments. This involves harnessing a trans-disciplinary approach wherein, the domains of data sciences, HCI, embedded robotics, computational simulation and user-centric interaction design merge in order to promote real-time responsive augmentation (physical, ambient, social and structural) of the built environment. The paper elaborates upon two projects: RoboZoo and FLUID, both built and tested in The Netherlands, representing two different scales; Small scale: object/product scale, which operate within urban open public space and Large scale: indoor public installation.