Designing a robot through prototyping in the wild

This paper describes the design and initial evaluation of Dewey, a do-it-yourself (DIY) robot prototype aimed to help users manage break-taking in the workplace. We describe the application domain, prototyping and technical implementation, and evaluation of Dewey in a real office environment to show how research using simple prototypes can provide valuable insights into user needs and practices at the early stages of socially assistive robot design.