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Touchscreen devices, ubiquitous in humans' day-to-day lives, offer a promising avenue for animal enrichment. With advanced cognitive abilities, keen visual perception, and adeptness to engage with capacitive screens using dexterous tongues, parrots are uniquely positioned to benefit from this technology. Additionally, pet parrots often lack appropriate stimuli, supporting the need for inexpensive solutions using off-the-shelf devices. However, the current human-centric interaction design standards of tablet applications do not optimally cater to the tactile affordances and ergonomic needs of parrots. To address this, we conducted a study with 20 pet parrots, examining their tactile interactions with touchscreens and evaluating the applicability of existing HCI interaction models. Our research highlights key ergonomic characteristics unique to parrots, which include pronounced multi-tap behavior, a critical size threshold for touch targets, and greater effectiveness of larger targets over closer proximity. Based on these insights, we propose guidelines for tablet-based enrichment systems for companion parrots.
Augmentative and alternative communication devices (AACs) are designed to assist humans with complex communication needs. Recently, AAC use has been reported in non-human animals. Such tools may potentially provide enrichment and increase interspecies connection. However, there is no evaluation framework and little data available to assess AAC potential. Here, we examine seven months of a single parrot’s sustained use of a tablet-based AAC totaling 129 sessions within 190 days. After devising a coding schema, we propose a framework to explore the expressive potential and enrichment value for the parrot. Our results suggest that the choice of destination words cannot be simply explained based on random selection or icon location alone, and 92\% of corroborable selections are validated by behaviors. The parrot interactions also appear significantly skewed toward social and cognitive enrichment. This work is a first step toward assessment of AAC use for parrot enrichment.
The concept of the animal Internet has flourished, with many conceptualisations proceeding from the premise that connecting animals online may enrich their social life. Yet we remain unaware of how -- or even whether -- online interactions (either live or with pre-recorded material) might affect how animals engage with other animals. We implemented a system for parrots to trigger live video calls with other birds or playback from a pre-recorded video call. The goal was to identify differences in engagement and behaviours. Over a six-month study, parrots triggered significantly more live calls and engaged longer in that setting relative to the playback condition, while the animals' caregivers found greater value in the latter but preferred the live alternative for the birds under their care. The results begin to question what animals make of online remote connections, putting forward considerations as to how the internet can affect animals' experiences.
Computer technology for animals is typically oriented toward isolated individuals, seldom attending to such group-living factors as accommodating differences between individuals. To address this shortcoming of research and practice, the authors designed and developed an audio-based system that lets lemurs in group accommodation voluntarily trigger audio via a novel device dubbed LemurLounge and listen to it on their own. This interactive system was deployed for 14 lemurs, of three species (black-and-white, brown, and ring-tailed), in their normal habitat. The device's presence clearly influenced lemurs' visits to the relevant portion of the enclosure. Alongside a general preference for audio over silence, assessment of individual- and species-level differences revealed significant differences at both levels, though no particular sound type (rainfall, traffic, either upbeat or relaxing music, or white noise) was favoured. The findings and design work highlight the need for customisable and adaptive computer technology for animals living in group settings, with important implications for lemurs and other primates, humans included.
While ethical challenges are widely discussed in HCI, far less is reported about the ethical processes that researchers routinely navigate. We reflect on a multispecies project that negotiated an especially complex ethical approval process. Cat Royale was an artist-led exploration of creating an artwork to engage audiences in exploring trust in autonomous systems. The artwork took the form of a robot that played with three cats. Gaining ethical approval required an extensive dialogue with three Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) covering computer science, veterinary science and animal welfare, raising tensions around the welfare of the cats, perceived benefits and appropriate methods, and reputational risk to the University. To reveal these tensions we introduce beneficiary-epistemology space, that makes explicit who benefits from research (humans or animals) and underlying epistemologies. Positioning projects and IRBs in this space can help clarify tensions and highlight opportunities to recruit additional expertise.