## How can a robot help grandma feel less lonely?

This is an example of a very common research design pattern: first up is to obtain an overview of the situation and existing work in Field and Library, then come to a possible solution in the Workshop, to then evaluate this in Lab and Showroom. This is an example of a linear process.

A request, opportunity or problem to solve often comes from the application context. For example, you visit your grandma, and she tells you she often feels lonely. You have heard before that it is common for elderly to feel this way. Apparently, this is a frequently occurring problem. You just happened to have obtained some experience with robots during a project in the previous quartile. Could robots provide a suitable solution here?

A project often starts with obtaining a better overview of and insight into the problem. When does grandma feel lonely, and when does she not? What does grandma say she wants? You want information from the application context - the situation in which the solution will be applied. Overview in the application context? Then you arrive at the Field strategy. You could interview grandma. If you decide to use a method, do check the best practices to do it right (Library strategy!). You do not just want to drink a cup of tea with grandma. You also want to make sure you get answers to your questions. For an interview, you could, for example, create a topic list. To do this, again you could use a method from the Library strategy: what is already known to contribute to the feeling of loneliness in the elderly? Perhaps it includes some topics to also ask grandma about? And, if you are already at the retirement home, you could also interview a couple of other grandmas, to see if you can create a solution that could help more than one person.

Now you have a better view of the problem you are trying to solve and grandma's wishes, a suitable next step would be to look at what has already done by others. Overview in Available work: the Library strategy. Does the solution already exist? Maybe there have been some attempts, but there were still some problems to solve? Learn from that to improve your own solution. The library strategy can also yield useful information about existing parts you might reuse, such as a suitable cuddly robot, or a software library for speech recognition and speech generation. Also check the best practices for the methods and processes you want to use. Common ways to retrieve information in the library strategy is to search the internet or to ask an expert for advice (tip: when interviewing experts, you could again use a topic list). The library strategy often saves you a lot of work, as you can continue to build on the work of others before you - "Standing on the shoulders of giants".

You have the wishes and inspiration from your talks with the grandmas and from available work. The next step is to arrive at a design and to implement it. It is time for innovation in the Workshop. Brainstorming, designing interactions and building prototypes are all activities you could do here. The methodical approach remains important here. If you just click a solution together, the chance is very small the solution will really be usable. Also from this strategy, you will regularly make short side-steps into other strategies, for example to Library to gain insight into how to best approach certain tasks, or to Field to learn more about the context of use, and to Lab to conduct a quick test if things work as intended or to demonstrate an in-between prototype to grandma.

When you have realized a prototype, the main question is: does the robot actually decrease grandma's sense of loneliness? You want certainty in the Application context: time for the Lab strategy. The aim here is to evaluate whether your solution indeed solves the problem and fulfills the wishes and demands formulated at the beginning of the project. For different types of requirements, there are different types of tests. You could ask grandma to log each hour how she feels, on a normal day and then the same for a day with the robot, to compare this data. If other grandmas are willing to participate again, you will have even more certainty!

There is still one important research strategy missing: Showroom. Showroom provides certainty with respect to Available work. Does your solution really provide something new compared to the already existing solutions? Compare your solution with existing social robots to make clear what the differences are. To make sure others could continue to build on your project, don't forget to provide sufficient documentation.