Privacy at Home with Robots

Future plans for people being able to live longer at home include having robots to help out with different tasks or to observe things (e.g., vital signs, if the person has fallen) to make sure a person is safe. These robots may be helpful, but they also will intrude into people's privacy since the robot will be gathering lots of data about the person and may be doing many different things with the data. In this master's, we want to look at the different issues and trade-offs people have with having a robot at home, the needs they have for a robot, their privacy concerns, and how these can be balanced. Possible areas of exploration can be gathering information from people for guidelines in designing robots at home or designing ways expressing privacy or surveillance and evaluating them in a home environment (or both). Some of these ideas could be applicable to the Internet of Things or other autonomous systems that we allow in our homes.