Recentimprovementsintechnologyhavefacilitatedtheuseofrobotsandvirtualhu-mans not only in entertainment and engineering but also in the military (Hill et al.,2003),healthcare(Pollacketal., 2002),andeducationdomains(Johnson,Rickel, &Lester, 2000). As active partners of humans, such machine assistants can take theform of a robot or a graphical representation and serve the role of a ﬁnancial assis-tant, a health manager,or even a social partner. As a result, interactive technologiesare becomingan integralcomponentof people’severydaylives.Developing useful and usable assistants in everyday situations requires an in-terdisciplinary approach involving engineering, computer science, and psychology.Engineering fundamentals and skills to produce a functional system are importantas well as mathematical foundations of computing such as computer architecture,algorithm theory, and embedded systems (Kitts & Quinn, 2004). Understandingthe interaction with such systems also requires the scientiﬁc knowledge of men-tal processes and behavior of the users. Our perspective is from this psychologyside, speciﬁcally, human factorspsychology.The goal of this branch of psychologyis a better understandingof user characteristics, attitudes, roles, and expectationsofmachine assistants. Characteristics such as perceived usefulness, ease of use, andcomplexityare critical to consider duringthe design giventhat in a pervasiveambi-
['Sung Park', 'Arthur D. Fisk', 'Wendy A. Rogers']
Human Factors Consideration for the Design of Collaborative Machine Assistants