MäRI

Åbo Akademi/Experience Lab and Arcada are collaborating on the MäRI (Human-robot interaction) project, which aims to develop evidence-based knowledge on how caregivers and care students experience the encounter with a social, humanoid robot.

The focus is on understanding how trust towards the robot is perceived and expressed and what implications this has for a human-centered, ethical design of robot-assisted solutions, which target potentially vulnerable groups.

The project will create an application for a selected robotic platform and Arcada and Vaasa Experience Lab are collaborating on the design work as well as the testing of the content of the applications in healthcare.

Once the application is ready, it will be tested on the target group. The target group in this case has Swedish as their mother tongue and an important part of the project is about the robots' ability to speak Swedish and the target group's ability to understand and trust what the robots say.

Once the project has achieved results, these will be shared with healthcare professionals, teachers, students and other stakeholders via the networks of both universities. The whole field is in dire need of research-based knowledge in this area.

The Märi project is an important step in bringing together and strengthening knowledge on social robots in Sweden-Finland.

The project is funded by Svenska kulturfonden and led by Susanne Hägglund (ÅA) and Christa Tigerstedt (Arcada).