Is the Robot Spying on me? A Study on Perceived Privacy in Telepresence Scenarios in a Care Setting with Mobile and Humanoid Robots

The number of robots that are in use worldwide is increasing, and they are starting to be used in new areas, where a use of robotics was impossible in the past, such as nursing care. This brings about new challenges that need to be addressed, one of them is the challenge of privacy preservation. Privacy in robotics is still a very new field that has not been studied deeply yet, even though some studies show that it is a crucial factor. In this article, we investigate how users feel about their privacy when interacting in a telepresence scenario with three different technical means: a laptop computer with a built-in camera, the mobile robot Temi and the humanoid robot Ameca. Behaviors from human interaction were implemented for the humanoid robot, which are not aimed directly at deactivating the sensors, but symbolize this deactivation. We conducted a user study with 21 participants. We did not find out any statistical significant difference between the elements, which shows that the robotic solutions are also popular and people feel comfortable around them. In addition, we also found out that the best way for a humanoid robot to indicate privacy to the participants is to perform actions where it closes the eyes and gives a sense of deactivation. Lastly, the results show that even though the acceptance of a humanoid robot is quite good, further work is needed to increase the control feeling in order to increase the trust of the user over it.