Designing a conversational agent for cognitive assistance in the kitchen
Conversational user interfaces can significantly decrease technology adoption barriers among older adults, which provides new possibilities to develop interactive technologies to enhance older adults' independence and agency. Home cooking is an everyday activity that is connected to healthy and active ageing, but kitchen technologies to date lack interactivity and therefore might risk autonomy.
This project presents a participatory design of a conversational agent for the provision of cognitive assistance in older adults' home cooking. Through a video-ethnographic investigation of complexity of everyday cooking practices, the project has developed a dialogue model for the provision of organisational assistance in recipe following and nutrition advice. The dialogue model was tested with a Wizard of Oz methodology with participants interacting with the agent while preparing a meal in the kitchen. The project explored interaction mechanisms and challenges among older adults through the concept of context-awareness and proactivity. The project also developed graphic transcript as a method to design more inclusive and interactive technologies with older adults.
Research team:
Sanna Kuoppamäki, Assistant Professor, KTH
Razan Jaber, PhD student, Stockholm University
Aida Hosseini, Research assistant, KTH
Donald McMillan, Senior Lecturer, Stockholm University
Funding:
Digital Futures - Advanced Adaptive Intelligent Systems (2021-2024)
Publications:
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Razan Jaber, Sabrina Zhong, Sanna Kuoppamäki, Aida Hosseini, Iona Gessinger, Duncan P Brumby, Benjamin R. Cowan, and Donald McMillan. (2024). Cooking With Agents: Designing Context-aware Voice Interaction for Complex Tasks. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24). https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.364218 *Best Paper Award*
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Kuoppamäki, S., Jaberibraheem, R., Hellstrand, M., & McMillan, D. (2023). Designing Multi-Modal Conversational Agents for the Kitchen with Older Adults: A Participatory Design Study. International Journal of Social Robotics 15, 1507-1523. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-023-01055-4
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Kuoppamäki, S., Hellstrand, M., McMillan, D. (2024). Uncovering older adults’ digital repertoires for designing conversational scenarios: Graphic transcript as a design method. In: Hänninen, R., Taipale, S., Haapio-Kirk, L. (eds). Embedded and everyday technology. Digital repertoires in an ageing society. UCL Press.
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Kuoppamäki, S., Tuncer, S., Eriksson, S., & McMillan, D. (2021). Designing Kitchen Technologies for Ageing in Place: A Video Study of Older Adults’ Cooking at Home. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 5(2), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3463516
