Relationship between device performance, trust and user behaviour in a care-taking scenario

Abstract

We present insights obtained from a web-based game designed to investigate trust-related factors in a care-taking scenario. The game is set in a retirement village, where elderly residents live in smart homes equipped with monitoring systems. These systems should raise alerts when adverse events happen, but they do not function perfectly (they may issue false alerts or miss true events). Players, who "work" in the village, perform a primary task, whereby they must ensure the welfare of the residents by attending to adverse events in a timely manner, and a secondary routine task that demands their attention. Our contributions are (1) the game itself, which supports experimentation with various trust-related factors; (2) a methodology for the calibration of the game's parameters; (3) insights from two experiments regarding the relationship between device performance, in particular error type, and trust and user behaviour; and (4) insights from predictive models about factors that influence trust and aspects of user behaviour.