On the role of technology in human-dog relationships: a future of nightmares or dreams?

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2202.02030v2
• Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2022 12:28:43 GMT
• Title: On the role of technology in human-dog relationships: a future of nightmares or dreams?
• Abstract summary: Digital technologies that help people take care of their dogs are becoming more widespread. Yet, little research explores what the role of technology in the human-dog relationship should be. We conducted a qualitative study incorporating quantitative and thematic analysis of 155 UK dog owners reflecting on their daily routines and technology's role in it.
• Score: 1.3299507495084417
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Digital technologies that help people take care of their dogs are becoming more widespread. Yet, little research explores what the role of technology in the human-dog relationship should be. We conducted a qualitative study incorporating quantitative and thematic analysis of 155 UK dog owners reflecting on their daily routines and technology's role in it, disentangling the what-where-why of interspecies routines and activities, technological desires, and rationales for technological support across common human-dog activities. We found that increasingly entangled daily routines lead to close multi-species households where dog owners conceptualize technology as having a role to support them in giving care to their dogs. When confronted with the role of technology across various activities, only chores like cleaning up after their dogs lead to largely positive considerations, while activities that benefit themselves like walking together lead to largely negative considerations. For other activities, whether playing, training, or feeding, attitudes remain diverse. In general, across all activities both a nightmare scenario of technology taking the human's role and in doing so disentangling the human-dog bond, as well as a dream scenario of technology augmenting human abilities arise. We argue that the current trajectory of digital technology for pets is increasingly focused on enabling remote interactions, an example of the nightmare scenario in our thematic analysis. It is important to redirect this trajectory to one of technology predominantly supporting us in becoming better and more informed caregivers.

Related papers

• Equanimity in HRI: Applying Calm Technology Principles to Human-Robot Interaction [1.2067605151569847]
  This paper explores how textitCalm Technology can be integrated into Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)<n>It offers comprehensive guidelines for designing assistive robots that prioritize and enhance the human need for textitequanimity<n>The goal is to foster a balanced, unobtrusive interaction between humans and robots, especially in the home environment, as it is the most privat environment in everyone's life.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-04-20T13:16:58Z)
• HHI-Assist: A Dataset and Benchmark of Human-Human Interaction in Physical Assistance Scenario [63.77482302352545]
  HHI-Assist is a dataset comprising motion capture clips of human-human interactions in assistive tasks.<n>Our work has the potential to significantly enhance robotic assistance policies.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-09-12T09:38:17Z)
• Towards Immersive Human-X Interaction: A Real-Time Framework for Physically Plausible Motion Synthesis [51.95817740348585]
  Human-X is a novel framework designed to enable immersive and physically plausible human interactions across diverse entities.<n>Our method jointly predicts actions and reactions in real-time using an auto-regressive reaction diffusion planner.<n>Our framework is validated in real-world applications, including virtual reality interface for human-robot interaction.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-08-04T06:35:48Z)
• Engineering Digital Systems for Humanity: a Research Roadmap [7.723463986102129]
  Human, societal, and environmental values, alongside traditional software quality, are increasingly recognized as essential for sustainability and long-term well-being. Traditionally, systems are engineered taking into account business goals and technology drivers. This paper argues that engineering of systems should also consider human, societal, and environmental drivers.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-12-27T14:28:39Z)
• Learning to Assist Humans without Inferring Rewards [65.28156318196397]
  We build upon prior work that studies assistance through the lens of empowerment. An assistive agent aims to maximize the influence of the human's actions. We prove that these representations estimate a similar notion of empowerment to that studied by prior work.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-11-04T21:31:04Z)
• Engineering Digital Systems for Humanity: Challenges and Opportunities [7.056824589733873]
  Social and human values, besides the traditional software behaviour and quality, are recognized as important for sustainability and long-term well-being. We identify macro and technological challenges and opportunities of present and future digital systems that should be engineered for humanity.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-13T12:53:59Z)
• Computer Vision for Primate Behavior Analysis in the Wild [61.08941894580172]
  Video-based behavioral monitoring has great potential for transforming how we study animal cognition and behavior. There is still a fairly large gap between the exciting prospects and what can actually be achieved in practice today.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-29T18:59:56Z)
• Common (good) practices measuring trust in HRI [55.2480439325792]
  Trust in robots is widely believed to be imperative for the adoption of robots into people's daily lives. Researchers have been exploring how people trust robot in different ways. Most roboticists agree that insufficient levels of trust lead to a risk of disengagement.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-11-20T20:52:10Z)
• Learning to Influence Human Behavior with Offline Reinforcement Learning [70.7884839812069]
  We focus on influence in settings where there is a need to capture human suboptimality. Experiments online with humans is potentially unsafe, and creating a high-fidelity simulator of the environment is often impractical. We show that offline reinforcement learning can learn to effectively influence suboptimal humans by extending and combining elements of observed human-human behavior.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-03-03T23:41:55Z)
• How Technology Impacts and Compares to Humans in Socially Consequential Arenas [0.0]
  I make comparative analyses between humans and machines in three scenarios. I seek to understand how sentiment about a technology, performance of that technology, and the impacts of that technology combine to influence how one decides to answer my main research question.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-11-02T18:01:11Z)
• Human's Role in-the-Loop [15.759742984491412]
  This blog discusses the respective roles of humans and machines in achieving cognitive tasks in matching. It aims to determine whether traditional roles of humans and machines are subject to change. Two possible modes of change, namely humans out and humans in, will be discussed.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-04-27T13:11:54Z)
• Cetacean Translation Initiative: a roadmap to deciphering the communication of sperm whales [97.41394631426678]
  Recent research showed the promise of machine learning tools for analyzing acoustic communication in nonhuman species. We outline the key elements required for the collection and processing of massive bioacoustic data of sperm whales. The technological capabilities developed are likely to yield cross-applications and advancements in broader communities investigating non-human communication and animal behavioral research.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-04-17T18:39:22Z)
• Social Navigation with Human Empowerment driven Deep Reinforcement Learning [20.815007485176615]
  The next generation of mobile robots needs to be socially-compliant to be accepted by their human collaborators. In this paper, we go beyond the approach of classical acfRL and provide our agent with intrinsic motivation using empowerment. Our approach has a positive influence on humans, as it minimizes its distance to humans and thus decreases human travel time while moving efficiently towards its own goal.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-03-18T11:16:07Z)
• Human Grasp Classification for Reactive Human-to-Robot Handovers [50.91803283297065]
  We propose an approach for human-to-robot handovers in which the robot meets the human halfway. We collect a human grasp dataset which covers typical ways of holding objects with various hand shapes and poses. We present a planning and execution approach that takes the object from the human hand according to the detected grasp and hand position.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-03-12T19:58:03Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.