Laurel Riek - Research

My research is situated in the areas of human robot interaction (HRI) and assistive technology. I focus on the design of new technologies that can support disabled people and their families in community settings, and clinicians and patients in acute care.

Our research informs work across multiple disciplines, including: HRI, HCI/HCAI, design, accessibility, robotics, health informatics, and public health. You can learn more about working in the lab and the kinds of research we do here.

We engage in participatory, community-based research to center the voices of individuals historically excluded from technology design and development, and are committed to exploring the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of all our research.

Here are a few project highlights:

Robots to support cognitive accessibility

We have been collaboratively designing and developing new assistive technologies in collaboration with people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to those with late stage dementia. This includes social robots that can extend access to cognitive neurorehabilitation at home, like CARMEN (Bouzida et al., HRI 2024, Kubota et al. HRI 2023, HRI 2022, HRI 2020), and helping support care partners (Guan et al., CHI 2021, Moharana et al., HRI 2019).

We have developed new ways to make robot programming accessible to people with MCI (Cruz Sandoval et al., HRI 2025), and have been working with people with chronic illnesses to envision new forms of accessible telepresence robots (Ghosh et al., THRI 2025)

Clinically assistive robots & HRI in complex, socio-technical settings

We have several projects centered on supporting clinicians and patients in acute care, including the emergency department (ED), as well as critical care (e.g., the ICU). Here, we have been designing low-cost, open source telemedical robots that can extend access to patients, particularly those from low-resource settings. (Matsumoto et al., HRI 2023, Pervasive Health 2021).

We are also studying teamwork in complex, socio-technical settings, like acute care and first response (Jamshad et al., CHB 2026, RO-MAN 2024, Taylor et al., HRI 2022, ICRA 2021, CSCW 2019), and co-envisioning what future hospitals might look like (Taylor et al., CSCW 2022).

Recently, we have been exploring care work, and exploring what it means to embed technology within complex acute care settings (Jayaraman et al., HRI 2026, THRI 2026).

Critical health technology design & ethics

We also work on critical health technology design, and several ELSI topics. For example, we've explored how to engage in value-centric design processes when creating assistive and personalized robots for people with dementia that support their autonomy (Kubota et al., We Robot 2021, Guan et al., CHI 2021), ways to reflect social models of disability to reframe assistive robotics (Lee and Riek, THRI 2022, THRI 2018), ways to design for exit (Bjorling and Riek, We Robot 2022), and supporting disability justice (Ghosh et al, HRI 2026). We also have explored myths of automation and how these imaginaries impact the workforce (Riek and Irani, CHI 2025)

Healthcare Robotics Lab, Jun 2021