PRIBONY: Understanding Older Adults’ PRIvacy Concerns about RoBOts and Exploring TranspareNcY as a Solution to Address them

• Applicant: Professorin Dr.-Ing. Delphine Reinhardt
• Subject Area: Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 539453929

With an aging population, more and more older adults are expected to remain alone in their living environment. To prevent the negative impacts of such isolation and assist older adults in their daily tasks, mobile social assistive robots can be deployed at their home. Such deployment can, however, raise privacy concerns. These concerns can lead to changes in older adults' behaviors up to their refusal to use the robot. Addressing these concerns is therefore necessary to foster the future acceptance and adoption of these robots, so that older adults can profit from their benefits. To be able to do so, we are however missing a comprehensive analysis of older adults' privacy perceptions and concerns. Until now, both have only been considered as secondary aspects in existing studies. Hence, no detailed knowledge about factors that can influence them is available yet. We therefore aim at bridging this gap in PRIBONY. Based on the gained knowledge, we will further design an innovative solution to address these privacy concerns. In more details, we will apply a user-centered approach to develop a new transparency solution tailored to older adults' needs and capabilities. By using it, older adults will be informed in a usable fashion about the data handling practices of the robot and assisted in making privacy-related decisions in the exercise of their right to informational self-determination. Our designed solution will be integrated in a demonstrator and evaluated by means of further user studies to assess its impact on older adults' (1) concerns, (2) capability and confidence in making privacy-related decisions, and (3) acceptance of the considered robot. As a result, the outcomes of this project will not only benefit privacy researchers and robot designers, but also ultimately benefit older adults.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants