Welfare Technology and User Experience: A Study of Seniors' Expectations on and First Impressions of a Robotic Shower

Abstract

This study shows that seniors strive to become more independent and that acceptance of welfare technology needs to be understood in the specific situation. User experiences from welfare technology, such as the robotic shower, that serve in a very inti-mate situation, may not be comparable to the results from previous studies of, for example, surveillance technology. The preliminary results in this paper build on both qualitative and quantitative data, and show that seniors are in general positive to replacing the current shower situation with a more autonomous shower situation as provided by the robotic shower. An important aspect for acceptance was the func-tionality of the robotic shower. Furthermore, this study showed that the understanding of the shower situation in general can be used for improvement of the current shower situation, to prevent learned helplessness.