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Socially assistive robots represent a promising tool in assistive contexts for improving people's quality of life and well-being through social, emotional, cognitive, and physical support. However, the effectiveness of interactions heavily relies on the robots' ability to adapt to the needs of the assisted individuals and to offer support proactively, before it is explicitly requested. Previous work has primarily focused on defining the actions the robot should perform, rather than considering when to act and how confident it should be in a given situation. To address this gap, this paper introduces a new data-driven framework that involves a learning pipeline, consisting of two phases, with the ultimate goal of training an algorithm based on Influence Diagrams. The proposed assistance scenario involves a sequential memory game, where the robot autonomously learns what assistance to provide when to intervene, and with what confidence to take control. The results from a user study showed that the proactive behaviour of the robot had a positive impact on the users' game performance. Users obtained higher scores, made fewer mistakes, and requested less assistance from the robot. The study also highlighted the robot's ability to provide assistance tailored to users' specific needs and anticipate their requests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Care ethics has been advanced as a suitable framework for evaluating the ethical significance of assistive robotics. One of the most prominent care ethical contributions to the ethical assessment of assistive robots comes through the work of Aimee Van Wynsberghe, who has developed the Care-Centred Value-Sensitive Design framework (CCVSD) in order to incorporate care values into the design of assistive robots. Building upon the care ethics work of Joan Tronto, CCVSD has been able to highlight a number of ways in which care practices can undergo significant ethical transformations upon the introduction of assistive robots. In this paper, we too build upon the work of Tronto in an effort to enrich the CCVSD framework. Combining insights from Tronto’s work with the sociological concept of emotional labor, we argue that CCVSD remains underdeveloped with respect to the impact robots may have on the emotional labor required by paid care workers. Emotional labor consists of the managing of emotions and of emotional bonding, both of which signify a demanding yet potentially fulfilling dimension of paid care work. Because of the conditions in which care labor is performed nowadays, emotional labor is also susceptible to exploitation. While CCVSD can acknowledge some manifestations of unrecognized emotional labor in care delivery, it remains limited in capturing the structural conditions that fuel this vulnerability to exploitation. We propose that the idea of privileged irresponsibility, coined by Tronto, helps to understand how the exploitation of emotional labor can be prone to happen in roboticized care practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physical assistive robotics are oriented to support and improve functional capacities of people. In physical rehabilitation, robots are indeed useful for functional recovery of affected limb. However, there are still open questions related to technological aspects. This work presents a systematic review of upper limb rehabilitation robotics in order to analyze and establish technological challenges and future directions in this area. A bibliometric analysis was performed for the systematic literature review. Literature from the last six years, conducted between August 2020 and May 2021, was reviewed. The methodology for the literature search and a bibliometric analysis of the metadata are presented. After a preliminary search resulted in 820 articles, a total of 66 articles were included. A concurrency network and bibliographic analysis were provided. And an analysis of occurrences, taxonomy, and rehabilitation robotics reported in the literature is presented. This review aims to provide to the scientific community an overview of the state of the art in assistive robotics for upper limb physical rehabilitation. The literature analysis allows access to a gap of unexplored options to define the technological prospects applied to upper limb physical rehabilitation robotics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing an authentic understanding of potential users' needs and translating these into usable categories as an input to research and development is an open problem. It is generally accepted that genuine knowledge of user needs is essential for the creation of any new technology. For assistive robots, however, this knowledge is even more important for two key reasons. First, because the form and function of these technologies is still in the process of negotiation, and second, because assistive robots are ultimately intended for a vulnerable population. In this paper, we describe a number of existing strategies to address this challenge and discuss some of their shortcomings, including a loss of data richness and context, the stereotyping of users and a lack of transparency and traceability. The primary contribution of this paper is a novel Authentic Citations process for capturing needs which aims to address these shortcomings. This process involves a thematic analysis of complex qualitative data to derive robotics needs for older people, which emphasises the retention of the original situated description, or 'authentic citation', for ongoing sensitising and grounding at all stages of the research and development cycle, and by various stakeholders. The Authentic Citations process adds additional rigour to a process that can be tacit and opaque and can be used by robotics researchers to analyse and translate qualitative research into usable categories. An additional contribution of this paper is an initial outline of a taxonomy of assistive robotics needs for older people, which contributes to improving the understanding of the user as a situated and complex person and can be used as an input to design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to regular sports competitions is often precluded for disabled people. Chess, which has been recognized as a sport by the International Olympic Committee in 1999, is a rare exception. Nevertheless, to compete in official tournaments, people suffering from a high level of motor impairment must rely on the assistance of a person to move their pieces on the chessboard, under their indications. This can result in a reduction of the feeling of independence and self-esteem. In this work, a service robot is employed as an assistant for competitive chess players, moving pieces on a standard chessboard for competitions, and adhering to the rules of the international chess federation (e.g. not relying on a custom sensorized chess-set). The robot is controlled through an intuitive graphical user interface. The user interface can be navigated with easy-to-use devices, such as a mouse, a touchpad, or a commodity joystick for motion-impaired people (Ottobock calibratable Mini joystick). An effective framework for the opponent's move identification from RGB-D images is proposed and used to keep track of the live game situation. The application is implemented in ROS on a PAL Robotics TIAGo robot, a service robot with a 7 degrees-of-freedom arm, an extensible torso, and a re-orientable RGB-D camera. The robustness of the application is tested by reproducing six famous chess games several times on a standard wooden competition chessboard, making TIAGo play on behalf of the player with white or black pieces, alternatively. The application is properly working without the need of operator intervention in the 91.6 % of the performed moves. The proposed approach successfully opens the door to independent competitive chess playing for motor disabled people in official tournaments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assistive robot arms enable people with disabilities to conduct everyday tasks on their own. These arms are dexterous and high-dimensional; however, the interfaces people must use to control their robots are low-dimensional. Consider teleoperating a 7-DoF robot arm with a 2-DoF joystick. The robot is helping you eat dinner, and currently you want to cut a piece of tofu. Today's robots assume a pre-defined mapping between joystick inputs and robot actions: in one mode the joystick controls the robot's motion in the x–y plane, in another mode the joystick controls the robot's z–yaw motion, and so on. But this mapping misses out on the task you are trying to perform! Ideally, one joystick axis should control how the robot stabs the tofu, and the other axis should control different cutting motions. Our insight is that we can achieve intuitive, user-friendly control of assistive robots by embedding the robot's high-dimensional actions into low-dimensional and human-controllable latent actions. We divide this process into three parts. First, we explore models for learning latent actions from offline task demonstrations, and formalize the properties that latent actions should satisfy. Next, we combine learned latent actions with autonomous robot assistance to help the user reach and maintain their high-level goals. Finally, we learn a personalized alignment model between joystick inputs and latent actions. We evaluate our resulting approach in four user studies where non-disabled participants reach marshmallows, cook apple pie, cut tofu, and assemble dessert. We then test our approach with two disabled adults who leverage assistive devices on a daily basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unceasing aging of the population is leading to new problems in developed countries. Robots represent an opportunity to extend the period of independent living of the elderly as well as to ameliorate their economic burden and social problems. We present a new social robot, Mini, specifically designed to assist and accompany the elderly in their daily life either at home or in a nursing facility. Based on the results of several meetings with experts in this field, we have built a robot able to provide services in the areas of safety, entertainment, personal assistance and stimulation. Mini supports elders and caregivers in cognitive and mental tasks. We present the robot platform and describe the software architecture, particularly focussing on the human–robot interaction. We give in detail how the robot operates and the interrelation of the different modules of the robot in a real use case. In the last part of the paper, we evaluated how users perceive the robot. Participants reported interesting results in terms of usability, appearance, and satisfaction. This paper describes all aspects of the design and development of a new social robot that can be used by other researchers who face the multiple challenges of creating a new robotic platform for older people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent technological advances enabled modern robots to become part of our daily life. In particular, assistive robotics emerged as an exciting research topic that can provide solutions to improve the quality of life of elderly and vulnerable people. This paper introduces the robotic platform developed in the ENRICHME project, with particular focus on its innovative perception and interaction capabilities. The project's main goal is to enrich the day-to-day experience of elderly people at home with technologies that enable health monitoring, complementary care, and social support. The paper presents several modules created to provide cognitive stimulation services for elderly users with mild cognitive impairments. The ENRICHME robot was tested in three pilot sites around Europe (Poland, Greece, and UK) and proven to be an effective assistant for the elderly at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomous robots are nowadays successfully used in industrial environments, where tasks follow predetermined plans and the world is a known (and closed) set of objects. The context of social robotics brings new challenges to the robot. First of all, the world is no longer closed. New objects can be introduced at any time, and it is now impossible to build an exaustive list of them nor having a precomputed set of descriptors. Moreover, natural interactions with a human being don't follow any precomputed graph of sequences or grammar. To deal with the complexity of such an open world, a robot can no longer solely rely on its sensors data: a compact representation to comprehend its surrounding is needed. Our approach focuses on task independent environment representation where human-robot interactions are involved. We propose a global architecture bridging the gap between perception and semantic modalities through instances (physical realizations of semantic concepts). In this article, we describe a method for automatic generation of object-related ontology. Based on it, a practical formalization of the ill-defined notion of "context" is discussed. We then tackle human-robot interactions in our system through the description of user request processing. Finally, we illustrate the flow of our model on two showcases which demonstrate the validity of the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work proposes a robot-assisted navigation approach based on user intent adjustment, in the context of robotic walkers. Walkers are prescribed to users with gait disorders so that they can support their body weight on the upper limbs, however, the manipulation of such devices can be cumbersome for some users. Common problems for the users are lack of dexterous upper limb control and visual impairments. These problems can render walkers' users helpless, making them unable to operate these devices effectively and efficiently. We present a new approach to robot-assisted navigation using a utility decision and safety analysis procedure with user intent adjustments learned by reinforcement learning (RL) and supported on a rapidly-exploring random tree inspired algorithm. The proposed approach offers full control of the assistive platform to the user until obstacles are detected. In dangerous scenarios, corrections are computed in order that the assistive platform avoids collisions and follows social norms, effectively guiding the user through the environment while enforcing safer routes. The experimental validation was carried out in a virtual environment and in a real world scenario using a robotic walker built in our lab (ISR-AIWALKER). Experimental results have shown that the proposed approach provides a reliable solution to the robot-assisted navigation of a robotic walker, in particular the use of utility theory to evaluate candidate motions together with a RL model increases the safety of the user's navigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a sign recognition system for a sign tutoring assistive humanoid robot. In this study, a specially designed 5-fingered robot platform with expressive face (Robovie R3) is used for interaction and communication with deaf or hard of hearing children using signs and visual cues. The robot is able to recognize and generate accurately a selected set of signs from Turkish sign language using various hand, arm and head gestures as relevant feedback. This paper focuses on the sign recognition system of the robot to recognize the human participant's signing during the interaction. The system is based on two different approaches including a conventional method involving artificial neural network combined with hidden Markov model and a deep learning based method involving long short-term memory. The system is tested both on offline and real-time settings within an interaction game scenario with deaf or hard of hearing children. During the study, besides testing the sign recognition system, participants' subjective evaluations and impressions were also collected and examined. The robot is perceived as likable and intelligent by the children, based on the questionnaires; and the proposed sign recognition system enables robust real-time interaction and communication of the assistive robot with children in sign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aims to investigate the interaction between older adults and a robotic walker named FriWalk, which has the capability to act as a navigation support and to guide the user through indoor environments along a planned path. To this purpose, we developed a guidance system named Simulated Passivity, which leaves the responsibility of the locomotion to the user, both to increase the mobility of elder users and to enhance their perception of control over the robot. Moreover, the robotic walker can be integrated with a tablet and graphical user interface (GUI) which provides visual indications to the user on the path to follow. Since the FriWalk and Simulated Passivity were developed to suit the needs of users with different deficits, we conducted a human–robot interaction experiment, complemented with direct interviews of the participants. The goals of the present work were to observe the relation between elders (with and without visual impairments) and the robot in completing a path (with and without the support of the GUI), and to collect the impressions about of the older adult participants about the interaction. Our results show an overall positive impression of the FriWalk and an evident flexibility and adaptability of its guidance system across different categories of users (e.g., with or without visual impairments). In the paper, we discuss the implications of these findings on service social robotics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A small bedside agent for preventing falls has been developed. It talks to a person on a bed to prevent them from getting out of bed abruptly, until a care worker arrives. This paper describes the user-oriented design process of the agent system. The development process involving users, such as nurses and caregivers, as well as older adults is described. First, hardware design, such as the outer shape, size, and function of the agent was reviewed by nurses and caregivers, mainly from a safety viewpoint. The prototype agent incorporating improvements based on their opinions was used experimentally by older adults after several review processes. Second, the software design of the agent, such as the content of voice call, was studied through multiple experiments to improve its acceptability. Lastly, the integrated model was introduced into care facilities and hospitals to investigate the practical serviceability of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assistive robotics field works with technologies aimed at assisting people with physical impairments. Simple tasks like passing through doorways can be a significant challenge for motored wheelchairs users. Besides, depending on the disability degree, the task may be impossible to complete without help. Therefore, mobile robotics technologies have been implemented in wheelchairs to give them intelligence, and a supervisory interface inserts the user in the control loop to complete the objectives. Thus, this research proposes an innovative method to assist the user to cross narrow passages automatically. The methodology works in known and unknown environments. Besides, it does not require mapping and global localization algorithms. In this technique, a depth camera recognizes the edges between a narrow path. A Kalman filter method is used to improve the precision of these points even when the passage leaves the camera field of view. Finally, a nonlinear controller performs the narrow passage crossing. This methodology was analyzed using a MATLAB model, Gazebo simulation platform, and a real mobile robot Pioneer-P3DX. The results demonstrated promising applicability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In developing countries, educational programs have been using an out of date teaching methodology, where students' only work is to listen to the professors' lessons without having practical applications or hands-on experience, thereby provoking a decrease in student attention span, motivation, and boredom with learning processes. This work proposes the use of robotic platforms inside elementary schools and universities to improve and evaluate the usability and effectiveness of robots on students' attention spans, motivation, and knowledge acquirement during their classes. This work mentions a case of study in Mexico where the use of the robotic platforms was evaluated. To evaluate the learning process of undergraduate students, a hexapod robot was used throughout a basic programming course to help the students learn about robotics programming and path planning algorithms. At the end of the course, several surveys were given to the students to evaluate their perceptions about the course and the use of the robotic platform. In the elementary school, a NAO Robot was used to give students four different diligences in physics, mathematics and physical education classes. During these experimentations, the attention span of the students and their ability to use the robotic platforms were observed, using a behavior observation protocol; also, their knowledge acquisition before and after class was evaluated. The results showed that the use of a robotic platform in class helps the students improve their knowledge acquisition and increases their motivation and attention span. Also, the surveys and usability analysis demonstrate that the design of the diligences and course projects were sufficient to generate greater interest among the students in the topics taught in school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robots could be a valuable tool for helping with dressing but determining how a robot and a person with disabilities can collaborate to complete the task is challenging. We present task optimization of robot-assisted dressing (TOORAD), a method for generating a plan that consists of actions for both the robot and the person. TOORAD uses a multilevel optimization framework with heterogeneous simulations. The simulations model the physical interactions between the garment and the person being dressed, as well as the geometry and kinematics of the robot, human, and environment. Notably, the models for the human are personalized for an individual's geometry and physical capabilities. TOORAD searches over a constrained action space that interleaves the motions of the person and the robot with the person remaining still when the robot moves and vice versa. In order to adapt to real-world variation, TOORAD incorporates a measure of robot dexterity in its optimization, and the robot senses the person's body with a capacitive sensor to adapt its planned end effector trajectories. To evaluate TOORAD and gain insight into robot-assisted dressing, we conducted a study with six participants with physical disabilities who have difficulty dressing themselves. In the first session, we created models of the participants and surveyed their needs, capabilities, and views on robot-assisted dressing. TOORAD then found personalized plans and generated instructional visualizations for four of the participants, who returned for a second session during which they successfully put on both sleeves of a hospital gown with assistance from the robot. Overall, our work demonstrates the feasibility of generating personalized plans for robot-assisted dressing via optimization and physics-based simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robots can provide assistance to a human by moving objects to locations around the person's body. With a well-chosen initial configuration, a robot can better reach locations important to an assistive task despite model error, pose uncertainty, and other sources of variation. However, finding effective configurations can be challenging due to complex geometry, a large number of degrees of freedom, task complexity, and other factors. We present task-centric optimization of robot configurations (TOC), which is an algorithm that finds configurations from which the robot can better reach task-relevant locations and handle task variation. Notably, TOC can return one or two configurations to be used sequentially while assisting with a task. TOC performs computationally demanding optimizations offline to generate a function that rapidly outputs the configurations online based on the robot's observations. TOC explicitly models the task, environment, and user, and implicitly handles error using representations of robot dexterity. We evaluated TOC with a software simulation of a mobile manipulator (a PR2) providing assistance with 9 activities of daily living to a user in a wheelchair and a robotic bed. TOC had an overall average success rate of 90.6% compared to 50.4%, 43.5%, and 58.9% for three baseline algorithms based on state-of-the-art methods from the literature. We additionally demonstrate how TOC can find configurations for more than one robot and can help with the optimization of environments for assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the medical field, rehabilitation of the lower limbs is a slow and continuous process, where healthcare professionals have to follow each patient over long periods of time. In conventional rehabilitation, the progression of a patient is assessed by a professional, who analyzes visual tracking data. This assessment is dependent on each professional's own experience. In this paper, we propose an approach to analyze tracking data, captured by our robotic walker's gait tracking system, to detect shifts in the gait pattern over time automatically. For this purpose, the system takes in gait tracking data and segments it into gait cycles (heel strike to heel strike). Then, our approach handles each gait cycle considering it as a group of gait parameters that define trajectories in that time frame. From each gait parameter within the cycle, spatiotemporal features are extracted and similarity rates are computed using autoencoders. These spatiotemporal features and similarity rates are fused in a feature space which is fed to a one-class support vector machine that constructs a model of the observable gait cycle. Each posterior observed gait cycle is checked for shifts, using a set of proposed novelty detection techniques. Experimental tests using a dataset captured using our robotic walker platform revealed a promising performance when detecting if a gait cycle is 'reference' or 'novel' when compared to a previously trained model of a unique 'reference' gait pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assistive robots in ambient assisted living environments can be equipped with learning capabilities to effectively learn and execute human activities. This paper proposes a human activity learning (HAL) system for application in assistive robotics. An RGB-depth sensor is used to acquire information of human activities, and a set of statistical, spatial and temporal features for encoding key aspects of human activities are extracted from the acquired information of human activities. Redundant features are removed and the relevant features used in the HAL model. An ensemble of three individual classifiers—support vector machines (SVMs), K-nearest neighbour and random forest—is employed to learn the activities. The performance of the proposed system is improved when compared with the performance of other methods using a single classifier. This approach is evaluated on experimental dataset created for this work and also on a benchmark dataset—the Cornell Activity Dataset (CAD-60). Experimental results show the overall performance achieved by the proposed system is comparable to the state of the art and has the potential to benefit applications in assistive robots for reducing the time spent in learning activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a structured methodology to improve the attention in math classes based on a NAO robot. Although there are several papers that use NAO as a social robot, this paper goes further integrating the robot inside the classes as well as an assistive tool to support the teachers. A multidisciplinary work was implemented with the junior high school in which the NAO robot was used. Two focus groups were established for the study. One of them use the robot during the classes and the other one was running the classes in conventional manner. A comparison about the students’ attention was conducted to validate the proposed methodology. The results show that the level of attention and motivation were improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robot teleoperation systems face a common set of challenges including latency, low-dimensional user commands, and asymmetric control inputs. User control with Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) exacerbates these problems through especially noisy and erratic low-dimensional motion commands due to the difficulty in decoding neural activity. We introduce a general framework to address these challenges through a combination of computer vision, user intent inference, and arbitration between the human input and autonomous control schemes. Adjustable levels of assistance allow the system to balance the operators capabilities and their perception of control authority. Additionally, a custom servo controller design allow for safe interactions of the robotic arm with the environment. We present experimental results demonstrating significant performance improvement using our shared-control assistance framework on adapted rehabilitation benchmarks with two subjects at various timepoints relative to their implantation with intracortical BCIs. Our results indicate that shared assistance mitigates perceived user difficulty in using a seven-degree of freedom robotic arm as a prosthetic and enables successful performance on previously infeasible tasks. We showcase the extensibility of our architecture with applications to quality-of-life tasks such as opening a door, pouring liquids from containers, and manipulation with objects previously unknown to the system in densely cluttered environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information and Communication Technology and personal robots could play a fundamental role in efficiently managing chronic diseases and avoiding improper medications. They could support senior citizens with reminders, thus promoting their independent living and quality of life, especially in the presence of several chronic diseases (multimorbidity). In this context, this article proposes a service model for personalised medical support that is able to provide adequate healthcare service by means of a hybrid robot-cloud approach. This service was quantitatively and qualitatively tested to assess the technical feasibility and user acceptability level of the service. The service was tested with 23 older people (65-86 years) in the DomoCasa Lab (Italy). This study demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed hybrid cloud solution and the usability and acceptability were positively evaluated thus confirming the ability to utilise these innovative technologies for active and healthy ageing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustaining independent living for elderly people in their own homes is desirable for various reasons. As older people become frail or disabled, a 'gap' appears between the abilities they still have and the abilities that are required for independent living. To a certain extent robots may close this gap by providing functionality lost through frailty or disability. A scenario was created involving a re-enablement coach robot. This scenario was discussed with older people, informal carers, and care professionals in focus groups in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and France. The results provided insights into the acceptability of robots and showed that older people were open to the idea of having a robot supporting them in their daily life. Participants were also willing to have a robot perform higher level coordinating tasks while playing the role of the re-enablement coach. However, participants wanted the robot to operate at the same level of intelligence as a human carer. This implies that more attention needs to be given to the development of the social skills and behaviour of such robots. Additionally, participants acknowledged that such a robotwould create tension between respecting the autonomy of the user (i.e. robot obeys all commands given by the user) and the promotion of independence in the long term (i.e. robot is programmed to maintain the abilities the user still has). Our results indi-cate that people preferred to resolve this tension in favour of autonomy. This choice, however, may decrease the user's abilities in the longer term and thereby undermine users' ability to live independently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a method for lower-limb exoskeleton control that defines assistance as a desired dynamic response for the human leg. Wearing the exoskeleton can be seen as replacing the leg's natural admittance with the equivalent admittance of the coupled system. The control goal is to make the leg obey an admittance model defined by target values of natural frequency, peak magnitude and zero-frequency response. No estimation of muscle torques or motion intent is necessary. Instead, the controller scales up the coupled system's sensitivity transfer function by means of a compensator employing positive feedback. This approach increases the leg's mobility and makes the exoskeleton an active device capable of performing net positive work on the limb. Although positive feedback is usually considered destabilizing, here performance and robust stability are successfully achieved through a constrained optimization that maximizes the system's gain margins while ensuring the desired location of its dominant poles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Devices for Assisted Living(DALi ) project is a research initiative sponsored by the European Commission under the FP7 programmeaiming for the development of a robotic device to assist people with cognitive impairments in navigating complex environments. The project revisits the popular paradigm of the walker enriching it with sensing abilities (to perceive the environment), with cognitive abilities (to decide the best path across the space) and with mechanical, visual, acoustic and haptic guidance devices (to guide the person along the path). In this paper, we offer an overview of the developed system and describe in detail some of its most important technological aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the prototyping of human-robot interactions in the University of Hertfordshire (UH) Robot House. Twelve participants took part in a long-term study in which they interacted with robots in the UH Robot House once a week for a period of 10 weeks. A prototyping method using the narrative framing technique allowed participants to engage with the robots in episodic interactions that were framed using narrative to convey the impression of a continuous long-term interaction. The goal was to examine how participants responded to the scenarios and the robots as well as specific robot behaviours, such as agent migration and expressive behaviours. Evaluation of the robots and the scenarios were elicited using several measures, including the standardised System Usability Scale, an ad hoc Scenario Acceptance Scale, as well as single-item Likert scales, open-ended questionnaire items and a debriefing interview. Results suggest that participants felt that the use of this prototyping technique allowed them insight into the use of the robot, and that they accepted the use of the robot within the scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The population of older adults in America is expected to reach an unprecedented level in the near future. Some of them have difficulties with performing daily tasks and caregivers may not be able to match pace with the increasing need for assistance. Robots, especially mobile manipulators, have the potential for assisting older adults with daily tasks enabling them to live independently in their homes. However, little is known about their views of robot assistance in the home. Twenty-one independently living older Americans (65-93 years old) were asked about their preferences for and attitudes toward robot assistance via a structured group interview and questionnaires. In the group interview, they generated a diverse set of 121 tasks they would want a robot to assist them with in their homes. These data, along with their questionnaire responses, suggest that the older adults were generally open to robot assistance but were discriminating in their acceptance of assistance for different tasks. They preferred robot assistance over human assistance for tasks related to chores, manipulating objects, and information management. In contrast, they preferred human assistance to robot assistance for tasks related to personal care and leisure activities. Our study provides insights into older adults' attitudes and preferences for robot assistance with everyday living tasks in the home which may inform the design of robots that will be more likely accepted by older adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When mobility degrades with age, it is of great significance to develop devices which can support the elderly in their day-to-day life. With the usage of intelligent assistive robotic systems, elderly population can lead a better quality of life independently. This article is a review of various assistive devices for elderly focussing on mobility and self-transfer systems. The practical difficulties in walking and moving from bed to wheel chair or wheel chair to toilet seat affect the daily activities of aged people. Depending on caregivers to access toilets affects one's dignity. The review covers various advances that have been evolved in this area of research and addresses the limitations to be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to address an innovative methodology for assessing the usability of a product. This methodology is particularly suitable for designing products that provide their main functions through their control interfaces. In particular, this case study relates to the usability assessment of two control devices for a wheelchair-mounted robot manipulator to assist physically disabled people. The study focuses on defining a synthetic usability index on the basis of two currently used methods: the multi criteria decision analysis and the Saaty's analytic hierarchy process. Several virtual reality (VR)-based experiments have been conducted, set up in accordance with a cross-array experimental plan, that adequately caters for both control and noise factors. Quantitative measures and subjective user evaluations have been collected to maximize the effectiveness, the efficiency and the satisfaction perceived by users while using the product. Compared to the literature on the subject, the proposed approach provides both more flexibility in defining quantitative indexes and more adequate results, even when involving only a small sample of users in the participatory design session. The use of VR technologies for the collection of the experimental data has been essential in terms of safety, costs and repeatability of the tests, as well as of the robustness with respect to noise factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an approach to promote students' social awareness as part of challenging projects in robot design. A new robot contest was developed to motivate and focus these projects: RoboWaiter, the first international robot competition in the rapidly growing area of assistive robotics. RoboWaiter has been held since 2009 in Hartford, Connecticut in conjunction with the annual international Trinity College Fire-Fighting Home Robot Contest. We describe how dialogue among the authors and members of the Connecticut Council on Developmental Disabilities (CTCDD) directed development of RoboWaiter and led the CTCDD actively to participate in the organization and execution of the contest. We discuss the assignment and rules of the competition as well as the engineering challenges associated with designing robots for RoboWaiter. We also present responses of contest participants, both engineering students and people with disabilities. These reflections indicate that the challenge of creating a fetch-and-carry robot raised curiosity among engineering students and increased their interest in participating in the project. Moreover, the RoboWaiter project helped students to recognize the social challenge of assistive robotics and to understand that engineering work has importance beyond pure technical achievement. Participation of people with disabilities in the robot contest was motivated by the wish to draw public attention to the need for new assistive technologies and to inspire socially responsible education in universities and schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing proportion of elderly people in society, together with recent advances in robotics, makes the use of robots in elder care increasingly likely. We outline developments in the areas of robot applications for assisting the elderly and their carers, for monitoring their health and safety, and for providing them with companionship. Despite the possible benefits, we raise and discuss six main ethical concerns associated with: (1) the potential reduction in the amount of human contact; (2) an increase in the feelings of objectification and loss of control; (3) a loss of privacy; (4) a loss of personal liberty; (5) deception and infantilisation; (6) the circumstances in which elderly people should be allowed to control robots. We conclude by balancing the care benefits against the ethical costs. If introduced with foresight and careful guidelines, robots and robotic technology could improve the lives of the elderly, reducing their dependence, and creating more opportunities for social interaction [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on spatial cognition and blind navigation suggests that a device aimed at helping blind people to shop independently should provide the shopper with effective interfaces to the locomotor and haptic spaces of the supermarket. In this article, we argue that robots can act as effective interfaces to haptic and locomotor spaces in modern supermarkets. We also present the design and evaluation of three product selection modalities—browsing, typing and speech, which allow the blind shopper to select the desired product from a repository of thousands of products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human control of high degree-of-freedom robotic systems can often be difficult due to a sparse control problem. This problem relates to the disparity in the amount of information required by the robot’s control variables and the relatively small volume of information a human can specify. To address the sparse control problem, we propose the use of subspaces embedded within the pose space of a robotic system. Driven by human motion, our approach is to uncover 2D subspaces using dimension reduction techniques that allow cursor control, or eventually decoding of neural activity, to drive a robotic hand. We investigate the use of five dimension reduction and manifold learning techniques to estimate a 2D subspace of hand poses for the purpose of generating motion. The use of shape descriptors for representing hand pose is additionally explored for dealing with occluded parts of the hand during data collection. We demonstrate the use of 2D subspaces of power and precision grasps for driving a physically simulated hand from 2D mouse input. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, toward robotic gait assistance, we investigate the feasibility of a cane-type assistive mobile robot accompanying the user autonomously through a clinical pilot experiment. As widely known, gait ability is important for all people to keep their quality of life. However, for people having weakened lower limbs such as elderly people, their postural sway during walking could be insuppressible and cause falling. To support the gait motion of elderly people, our group has been developing a series of hand-holding cane robots named Intelligent Cane. Such assistive robots are expected to remove barriers to the independent lives of elderly people. Recently, we have focused on the potential of a companion robot that follows the user ahead and can be touched or grasped for bracing whenever the user needs it. In order to demonstrate proof of our concept through an experiment with a motion capture system, we propose a user companion strategy that enables our cane robot to keep a constant relative distance between the robot and the user walking on a treadmill. We evaluate the accuracy of the user companion in an experiment where a user walks on a treadmill. Then, we conduct a clinical experiment with three healthy subjects walking on with the treadmill with our cane robot as a pilot study. Through the clinical experiment, we evaluate a postural stabilization effect of physical interaction with the robot and discuss the feasibility of our robotic gait assistance methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]