According to the World Health Organization1,2 the percentage of healthcare dependent population, such as elderly and people with disabilities, among others, will increase over the next years. This trend will put a strain on the health and social systems of most countries. The adoption of robots could assist these health systems in responding to this increased demand, particularly in high intensity and repetitive tasks. In a previous work, we compared a Socially Assistive Robot (SAR) with a Virtual Agent (VA) during the execution of a rehabilitation task. The SAR consisted of a humanoid R1 robot, while the Virtual Agent represented its simulated counter-part. In both cases, the agents evaluated the participants’ motions and provided verbal feedback. Participants reported higher levels of engagement when training with the SAR. Given that the architecture has been proven to be successful for a rehabilitation task, other sets of repetitive tasks could also take advantage of the platform, such as clinical tests. A commonly performed clinical trial is the Timed Up and Go (TUG), where the patient has to stand up, walk 3 m to a goal line and back, and sit down. To handle this test, we extended the architecture to evaluate lower limbs’ motions, follow the participants while continuously interacting with them, and verify that the test is completed successfully. We implemented the scenario in Gazebo, by simulating both participants and the interaction with the robot3. A full interactive report is created when the test is over, providing the extracted information to the specialist. We validate the architecture in three different experiments, each with 1,000 trials, using the Gazebo simulation. These experiments evaluate the ability of this architecture to analyse the patient, verify if they are able to complete the TUG test, and the accuracy of the measurements obtained during the test. This work provides the foundations towards more thorough clinical experiments with a large number of participants with a physical platform in the future. The software is publicly available in the assistive-rehab repository4 and fully documented.
Changes effected by environmental factors on the biological colonization of an historic marine limestone quay were considered, as a baseline study for the monitoring and test plan definition. Environmental factors play a fundamental role in the deterioration of stone monuments, particularly those located in a marine environment. This eighteenth century quay, situated at the Royal Square of the Portuguese capital, is subject to tidal movement, marine aerosol, high levels of pollution and vibration and is partly submerged in polluted water. Part of the quay was dismantled in 1997 and returned to the river water in 2008; since then, progressive (re)colonization by biological organisms has occurred. By means of periodic photographic registry, from 2010 to 2014, the main alterations and deposits on its surfaces were registered. The present paper discusses and presents a vulnerability assessment and monitoring plan for monuments in a marine environment with a view to establishing a preventive conservation plan.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.