The prompts below guided our follow-up interviews with co-design participants, conducted after a 14-week healthcare-robot co-design process.
How to read this guide
These materials guided semi-structured interviews. We opened each topic with the lead question and followed up with neutral probes (e.g., “Can you say more about that?”) and the listed prompts only when a participant had not already raised them. Questions were adapted, reordered, or skipped per participant rather than read verbatim or in a fixed order; bracketed examples in our working notes were not read aloud. The three blocks loosely map to the study's two guiding topics — the evolution of perceived promise and the envisioned human–robot coexistence in care.
A recap block to re-anchor participants in the artifacts they co-designed before discussing perception.
Highlights of the built prototypes
Regarding the journey to the final mockup: what features did you put the most effort into refining, and what considerations guided those refinements?
Improvements envisioned but not yet achieved
Beyond the final mockup: if you had more time, or were inspired by others' work during or after the soft opening, what would you want to improve? Were there things you feel weren't fully realized in the mockup that you would want developed if it were actually built?
Envisioning the prototype after deployment
If this robot were deployed in a real healthcare setting, what challenges or concerns do you foresee? What kinds of support do you think it would need to fit in well?
Corresponds to the paper's first guiding topic — the evolution of perceived promise.
Perceived promise · quick poll
How promising do you find the use of robots in healthcare settings? Please rate on a scale from 1 to 5. Compared to what you thought before the session, has this score changed? If so, did it increase or decrease, and why?
Revisiting concerns
In the pre-survey you raised some concerns. Have those concerns persisted, changed, or been addressed since — and in what ways?
Before this question, participants were reminded of their own earlier pre-survey responses.
Corresponds to the paper's second guiding topic — envisioned human–robot coexistence.
Lead question
How do you feel about robots becoming part of the everyday surroundings in hospitals, clinics, or other medical settings?
Follow-up probes · used only as needed