Experimental investigation on a robot-like remote control with strokes

This paper describes user studies on a novel remote control manipulatable with stroking its surface. There are lots of remote controls in our houses such as remote controls for TV, air conditioner, and so on. However, when we use a remote control, we need to look at both our fingers and an appliance that we would like to control. It may be not significantly problematic for young people, but elderly people have a difficulty in manipulating remote controls with many buttons. We consider it will be comfortable for various people to use a remote control without looking at their fingers and pushing buttons. We also consider a remote control should have robot-like appearance to become a more familiar artifact to users. In this study, we have proposed a robot-like remote control, Rebo, manipulatable only with stroking its surface and apply to an advanced TV system. The developed remote control has three advantages; familiarity, function awareness, and stroke manipulation, in contrast with conventional remote controls with many buttons. These advantages enable users to feel much familiarity by using it, to easily notice its implemented functions, and to use it without looking at the fingers and buttons. In this paper, we focus on experimental investigation for advantages of Rebo. We conducted experiments with participants and the experimental results supported such advantages.