"Oh, sorry, I think I interrupted you": Designing Repair Strategies for Robotic Longitudinal Well-being Coaching

Robotic well-being coaches have been shown to successfully promote people’s mental well-being. In order to provide successful coaching, a robotic coach should have the capability to repair the mistakes it makes. However, past works investigating robot mistakes are limited to game or task-based, one-off and in-lab studies. This paper presents a 4-phase design process to design repair strategies for robotic longitudinal well-being coaching with the involvement of real-world stakeholders. The design process consists of the following phases: 1) designing repair strategies with a professional well-being coach; 2) undertaking a longitudinal study with the involvement of experienced users (i.e., who had already interacted with a robotic coach before) to investigate the repair strategies defined in (1); 3) conducting a design workshop with the users of the study in (2) to gather their perspectives on the robotic coach’s repair strategies; 4) discussing the results obtained in (2) and (3) with the mental well-being professional to reflect on how to design repair strategies for robotic coaching. Our results show that users have different expectations for a robotic coach than a human coach, which influences how repair strategies should be designed. We show that different repair strategies (e.g., apologizing, explaining, or repairing empathically) are appropriate in different scenarios, and that preferences for repair strategies change during longitudinal, repeated interactions with the robotic coach.