Adaptive Assistance Systems: Approaches, Benefits, and Risks

Digital assistance systems have become ubiquitous in almost all areas of life, supporting us in the execution of tasks at work or in our everyday life. More and more of them are also able to adapt to the needs of the individual user and the environment. Although this development offers new possibilities and provides many benefits, it also poses challenges, as these kinds of systems not only have an impact on the performance of the user for a specific task but also affect psychological factors such as the user’s mental workload, self-efficacy, or satisfaction with the system or the task at hand. Moreover, research has shown that inappropriate levels of trust in or reliance on a digital assistance system (i.e., too high or too low) can lead to serious errors and even accidents. To provide effective and acceptable adaptive assistance, technical systems must first keep track of the state of the task, the environment, and the user and then take appropriate actions at the right time in order to improve the performance criteria of interest. The latter involves some form of interaction with the user and may include, e.g., informing, suggesting, intervening, or taking over control. This chapter provides an overview of different adaptive assistance systems, assistance types, and applied strategies, and it discusses their potential importance for the design of adaptive assistance systems. A categorization of different types and systems is presented; they are characterized according to the areas of use, the applied methods and technological implementations, the input data, and the possible effects on the user or the interaction. Concrete examples from our own research on adaptive assistance in monitoring tasks will be discussed.