Beyond video-conferencing:

telepresence technologies for extending expertise reach and specialised skill sharing

The workshop will be taking place on the 12th of January 2025, as part of GROUP '25

At Hilton Head Island, South Carolina and online.

Please contact Andriana (andriana.boudouraki@nottingham.ac.uk) for the registration code.

Abstract

Despite resurgent interest in remote work technologies, many forms of specialised work remain inaccessible. Participation in remote activities often requires more than video-conferencing. Telepresence technologies, using robotics and mixed reality, can fill that gap by supporting more affordances. However, we still need to know which affordances are needed and how they should be implemented. This workshop focuses on telepresence technologies for mediating specialised tasks and extending expertise reach, such as teaching technical skills or providing healthcare assistance. We will invite experts from specific fields (e.g., education, healthcare, industry) to guide participants through use cases, and interactive exercises to identify what kinds of actions and interaction modalities are important in different scenarios. The aim of the workshop is to initiate critical discussions into the design of telepresence technologies and foster future work driven by a focus on understanding practical user needs.

Workshop Themes

Many types of remote, collaborative activities require more engaging forms of interactivity than what mainstream technology currently supports. Specialised work, such as teaching technical skills often requires moving, altering one's point of view and interacting with objects. Telepresence technologies, such as robotics and Virtual Reality (VR) are a potential avenue for the extending the reach of experts to underserved populations. However, such technologies often miss the mark of what is required in order to successfully participate in hybrid modalities. This workshop aims to draw attention to the importance of understanding the specific demands of specialised tasks so as to inform design that caters to those needs. As Hollan and Stornetta (1992) argued, the media and mechanisms of remote work technologies ought to address specific user needs, rather than simply imitate the experience of `being there'. This workshop explores a participation-driven approach to telepresence, to examine ways of supporting the mediation of specialised skills and extend the reach of experts. During the workshop we expect to discuss the following themes:

Ways of perceiving mediated and mixed reality spaces
Input and output modalities of interaction
Different forms of mobility in mediated spaces
The implementation of telepresence devices in organisational settings
Safety, security and privacy considerations
The experience of co-located people
The accessibility of specialised telepresence devices
Implications for equality, diversity and inclusion
Infrastructural considerations
Technical considerations for effective use
Research methodologies for understanding user needs and evaluating telepresence technologies
Working with experts and institutions

Workshop Activities

This will be a full day, hybrid workshop, with remote attendees participating through Microsoft Teams and a Miro board for shared note-taking. The workshop will be divided into two main activities, aimed at engaging our thinking about what matters in mediating remote activities.

Understanding use cases:

The first activity will be aimed at understanding the practical considerations of using telepresence technologies for specified tasks. Experts from different fields will each give an overview of the setting in which they work. Outlining the routines, tasks, and challenges involved, they will present a use case to support subsequent discussions and activities. After each presentation, attendees will split into groups and discuss the implications of mediating that work through telepresence technologies. Each group will share their ideas, and have a chance to discuss them with the presenting expert. The selection of use cases will be decided based on the interest we receive from attendees. The organisers include researchers from education, rehabilitation, and assistive care, who can present use cases from their own work. If prospective attendees express interest in other areas of work, we will invite speakers from those areas, or ask the attendees to present their own use cases.

Interactive bodystorming:

The second part of the workshop is aimed at cultivating our attention to the different elements of interaction and envisioning effective mediation modalities. Attendees will split into small hybrid groups and select a use case; it may be one of those presented earlier or not. They will role-play scenarios involving the tasks of that use case and identify the relevant modes of interaction. The remote attendees can take the role of a remote worker and thus explore the limitations of their available modalities. The attendees will also be offered a variety of tools, props, and craft supplies (e.g., cardboard paper, Velcro, wheels, lights), as well as soma bits, which they can use to create prototypes and explore possible forms of telepresence technologies for their use case. The aim of this activity is not to produce fully-fledged solutions but to use this active, embodied experience to engage our thinking on challenges and possibilities of telepresence. Each group will have a chance to present their ideas to the rest of the attendees.

Call for Participation

This workshop is open to HCI researchers, developers, engineers and designers as well as researchers and practitioners from specialised fields who are interested in this topic. If you are interested in attending the workshop, please contact Andriana (andriana.boudouraki@nottingham.ac.uk) for the registration code.

Workshop attendees are required to register for the conference.

Optionally, attendees are also invited to submit a 2-4 page position paper in the ACM Journals Primary Article format. In their position papers, authors may reflect on ongoing or recent work (including case studies, prototype development, user trials, etc), highlight under-explored considerations, or discuss concepts, approaches, and other topics related to the workshop's themes.

Deadline for position papers: 13 December 2024

Provisional schedule

9:00: Coffee & Prep
9:30: Introductions & Welcome
10:00: Lighting Talks
10:45: Coffee break
11:00: Use case 1
11:45: Use case 2
12:30: Lunch break
14:00: Interactive ideation
14:45: Group presentations
15:15: Coffee break
15:30: Final Discussion
16:45: Closing

Accessibility

Remote access to the workshop will be possible through Microsoft Teams, which allows for background blurring, is screen reader-friendly, and supports live captioning. The Miro platform is also screen reader accessible, and we will create a board that allows for anonymous access without signing in. If you require any other accessibility assistance, please reach out to us and we will do our best to support you.

Organisers

Andriana Boudouraki

Andriana Boudouraki is a Research Fellow at the Mixed Reality Lab, at the University of Nottingham. She has recently completed her PhD there, which examined the use and deployment of Mobile Robotic Telepresence technologies for organisational settings. She is the main contact for this workshop

Niki Chouliara

Niki Chouliara is an applied psychologist, researching stroke rehabilitation, implementation and health

services research. She specialises in mixed-methods and realist evaluation methodologies and is interested in e-health for improving the accessibility of rehabilitation services and equality considerations for use of new rehabilitation technologies. She currently leads a Stroke Association funded project examining how stroke telerehabilitation.

Laura Fiorini

Laura Fiorini is an Assistant Professor in Bioengineering at the Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Florence. Currently, she is the coordinator of Pharaon Italian Pilot where telepresence services were tested for promoting socialization beyond the video-calling. She is also involved in other European and National project on the use of assistive devices (sensors and robots) for the support of frail citizens

Juan Martinez Avila

Juan Martinez Avila is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Nottingham. As part of the Mixed Reality Lab, he steers an interest group that investigates intelligent and interactive music technology research through practice-based methods, ethnography, participatory design, and embodied design ideation

Gisela Reyes-Cruz

Gisela Reyes-Cruz is a Transitional Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham. Her work investigates interaction with, trust in, and public acceptance of, a range of autonomous and robotic systems; from mobile apps that have, or may have, a component that works autonomously, to robots that can navigate a physical space on their own, such as telepresence robots. She currently leads a project exploring the use of telepresence robots in museums

Pratyusha Ghosh

Pratyusha Ghosh is a Computer Science Ph.D. student in the Healthcare Robotics Lab at the University of California San Diego. Her work is focused on the design and development of accessible telepresence robot systems that facilitate the remote inclusion of people with chronic illnesses and disabilities. As part of this work, she also examines the social and ethical factors that shape robot-mediated interactions in these communities and grounds her insights within critical disability studies paradigms.

Veronica Ahumada-Newhart

Veronica Ahumada-Newhart is an assistant professor of health informatics and HRI in the School of Medicine, Center for Health & Technology at UC Davis. Her work is focused on the use of social robots and interactive technologies for improved health and developmental outcomes. She is PI of an NSF grant on Robot-Mediated Learning and is co-PI of a Univ. of California, Office of the President grant to explore the use of telerobots for healthcare worker safety and community social inclusion

Houda Elmimouni

Houda Elmimouni is a CI Fellow and Postdoc at Indiana University Bloomington. She received her Ph.D from Drexel University. Her current work focuses on the use of Mobile Robotic Telepresence in the Classroom and human values. She previously organised a SIG and workshops about telepresence at CHI’18, CHI’22, CSCW’23, MobileHCI’23. She published her telepresence work at HRI, DIS, TACCESS and IJHCS.

Praminda Caleb-Solly

Praminda Caleb-Solly is Professor of Embodied Intelligence in the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham. She leads the Cyber-physical Health and Assistive Robotics Technologies Research Group, which conducts research in assistive robotics, smart sensing and artificial intelligence for personalised health and well-being. She has been pioneering the application of telepresence robots for disabled people to access social and cultural experiences.

Contact:

To submit your interest in participating in this workshop, or for any other queries please contact Andriana Boudouraki at andriana.boudouraki@nottingham.ac.uk

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