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About

Ioana Ocnarescu is a design researcher whose work sits at the compelling intersection of social robotics, human-computer interaction, and design methodology. Over more than a decade of sustained inquiry, she has focused on how robots can be meaningfully integrated into everyday human environments — particularly for elderly people, couples navigating retirement, and patients in rehabilitation settings. Her most influential contribution, a 2020 study on cohabitation with a humanoid robot among elderly users (43 citations), demonstrated that prolonged real-world exposure — 24 hours a day over seven days — reveals usability and accessibility challenges invisible in laboratory settings. This work has become a touchstone for researchers designing socially assistive robots (SARs) for home and clinical contexts. Her development of Yōkobo, a "robject" grounded in slow technology principles designed to gently strengthen bonds between newly retired couples, showcases her distinctive ability to blend emotional sensitivity with technical innovation. Ocnarescu also champions design thinking as a legitimate epistemological framework within robotics research, arguing through multiple publications that art and design perspectives are not peripheral but essential to building robots people actually want to live alongside. Her five-year longitudinal research program on socially assistive robotics reflects rare methodological ambition, making her a distinctive and humanizing voice in an increasingly technical field.