A study of how 8 households in Austria adopted Vector for 7 months

A research group in Austria has recently published a study in the 30th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication titled “Merely a Conventional ‘Diffusion’ Problem?On the Adoption Process of Anki Vector”.

What did they do?

The researchers chose a group of demographically diverse 8 households based in Austria and studied how these households interacted with a free Anki Vector over the course of seven months. The authors were particularly interested to understand which factors, if any, would lead to the adoption of a commercially available desk robot after the initial awe and excitement over the product withered away.

What did they find?

• The authors plotted the Likert score for the following dimensions: intelligence, use-fulness, ease of use, entertainment, attachment, impact, overall impression. For all households, the scores went down over the 7 month period. In the beginning, all participants had low to moderate levels of fear from Vector and believed that…