Exploring the need of an assistive robot to support reading process: A pilot study

Reading is one of the main activities that readers are immensely practicing during their daily lives and this activity is accompanied with some challenges that may cause disengagement during the process. Recently, assistive robotics technologies have shown extensive powerful effects in assisting its users to tackle various domain specific problems. From that perspective, the main goal of this pilot study is to investigate the problems that readers encounter during reading process. In addition, it aims to probe the need of an assistive robot that makes reading process less challenging. A questionnaire survey was distributed to 100 students at Universiti Utara Malaysia and the analysis of the results showed that an assistive robot is promising to support reading process. Similarly, this study detailed the embodiment and the design aspects that need to be applied while designing an assistive reading robot.