"This machine is for the aides": Tailoring Voice Assistant Design to Home Health Care Work

This paper explores how the design of interactive voice assistants (IVAs) might be tailored to support home health aides' important work in complex home care contexts. We designed two custom IVAs: one that looks like an aide's medical kit and one that blends into the home environment. We also designed a voice-based application that provides aides with guidance for day-to-day tasks and for performing a medical assessment. Via a lab-based study with 25 aides and seven patients, we explore how tailoring the IVAs' design to home health care might impact its acceptability as a work device, enabling cooperative work among aides and clients, while potentially causing conflict that will require IVA designers to decide whose values to prioritize. We also highlight limits in aides' power to control IVAs in clients' homes. Finally, we discuss implications for designing privacy-preserving IVAs, including leveraging IVAs' physical design to enact privacy mechanisms and opportunities to build 'always on' IVAs for privacy-sensitive contexts like home health care.