Telepresence robots video quality and interaction study

The experiment tool place durig PYNT community annual meeting on December 15 at TalTech. It was prefaced with a seminar where certain topics regarding human-robot interaction were covered by the team members and our partners.

Janika Leoste opened the seminar with a keynote based on her report “Are telepresence robots here to stay” that was followed by a presentation on a topic “Take the power of storytelling and gamification” by John Heijligers and “Lecturing versus active learning” that continued with a discussion about the reasons students or lecturers sometimes resist active learning and are there any ways to support them in embracing new methodic.

Piret Hirv from Tallinn Science Park Technopol presented a project named “Connected Health Cluster” - a country-wide partnership between health-related stakeholders in Estonia, who are commited to accelerating the adoption of connected health solution on international scale. The cluster will bring together startups, healthcare providers, IT companies, pharma companies and public authorities.

The question that the experiment was aimed to give an answer to was how robot-mediated interaction would affect human communication.

It involved a simulated communication situation in which a person acting through a telepresence robot needed to approach a colleague physically present in the room and invite him to dinner. In this situation, social distancing and eye contact had to be maintained, information had to be shared on the robot’s screen, and the person had to be ready to read text from paper. All of these situations are typical of interactions that take place in higher education, where the operator of the robot needs both skills and patience.
In addition, all three models of robots were ranked to reveal the preferences of the participants.