The Answer lies in User Experience: Qualitative Comparison of US and South Korean Perceptions of In-home Robotic Pet Interactions

Abstract

This paper describes a user experience comparison study to explore whether a user's 'cultural background' affects their interaction with in-home pet robots designed for health purposes, e.g. socially-assistive robots (SARs). 11 Koreans and 10 Americans were interviewed after interacting in their own homes with a SAR. Statistical analyses and TF-IDF keyword analyses were conducted to detect significant differences between groups in terms of code co-occurrences. Results showed that American participants were more likely to focus on the interactive experience itself, whereas Korean participants focused more on critiquing technical aspects of the technology. Such differences suggest that Koreans tend to treat robotic pets as tools, while Americans view the robotic pet through the lens of their past experience raising real-life pets. We discuss implications of this for human-robot interaction (HRI) regarding SARs may be dependent on users' cultural characteristics, e.g. necessitating customized content that takes into account culturally-specific modes of use.