Laila Burns is CRO and Co-Founder of Sielo Robotics.
Robotics is one of today’s most exciting and fast-growing areas of technology. Advances in embodied AI, controls and hardware are moving robots beyond factories and into the spaces where people live, work, heal and receive care.
But robotics truly reaches its full potential when it improves people’s lives in practical ways. The true promise of robotics is not only in what machines can do, but in what they can help people do.
One of the clearest examples of this promise is assistive robotics, where technology is being used to expand independence for people with disabilities. For someone with limited upper-limb mobility, that could mean reaching for a drink, picking up a dropped phone, opening a drawer or moving an object closer without having to ask for help.
These tasks may seem ordinary to some, but for many people with limited mobility due to aging, injury or physical disability, they can be incredibly complex and often impossible to do independently.
However, in assistive robotics, technical development and the human problem cannot become isolated from one another. A device may be technologically impressive, but if it does not properly solve the right problem for the intended user, its impact is limited.
This disconnect can be the difference between a robot that performs well in a controlled environment and a robot that genuinely improves someone’s daily life. At Sielo Robotics, which builds assistive robots, this has been the single most important lesson in our product development process.
Bridging The Gap Between Engineering And Real-World Use
When building assistive robotics, the potential for a disconnect between engineering decisions and the user’s needs is significant.
An engineering team may be excited to build a technically impressive robot, while the user may simply want to drink a glass of water independently, pick up a dropped phone or complete a small daily task without having to ask for help.
If those two perspectives are not constantly brought back together, scope creep, miscommunication and misaligned priorities can quickly follow, resulting in a product that falls short of solving the user’s problem.
That is why we have worked to keep users at the center of our design process. We regularly bring users into our lab, often multiple times per week and have people with lived experience working alongside our engineering team.
User feedback helps define the problem, shaping what to build from the beginning of the design process.
Why Direct Engineer-User Is Essential
One of our team’s most impactful operational shifts has been having our engineers interact directly with users and testers.
In many companies, user research is collected by one part of the team and then translated for the engineers building the product.
In the beginning, we took a similar approach. We did not want to distract our engineers from their technical work, so feedback was often gathered, summarized and passed along. Over time, however, we realized that something important was getting lost in that process.
User needs can become diluted when they move through too many layers: from the user to the person interpreting the feedback to the engineering lead to each individual engineer.
Even with the best intentions, this can create a game of telephone where the original problem becomes less clear by the time it reaches the people making design decisions.
When engineers are building technology that interacts so closely with a person’s body and environment, they need to understand the user’s experience directly. Hearing someone explain why a specific movement is difficult, why a mounting position feels intrusive or simply watching a user interact with their environment firsthand can change how an engineer thinks about the entire system.
This is especially important when engineers have little or no lived experience with the problem they are trying to solve.
How Users Become Part Of The Team
An unexpected benefit of working closely with users is that it can also change the way that companies think about hiring.
When users are brought into the design process, companies may meet people who not only understand the problem deeply, but who also have the skill set to become part of the core team.
In our case, some of the people we connected with through user conversations and testing became people we later hired or brought into the company more formally. In this way, people with lived experience of the problem can help shape both the product and the company from within.
As assistive robotics continues to evolve, there is a strong opportunity to build technology that increases independence, supports caregivers and helps more people live with comfort, dignity and choice in the places they call home.
That future depends on keeping users at the center of the design process from the beginning. Robotics reaches its full potential when it is shaped by the people whose lives it is meant to support.
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