Our community is facing serious problem: Aging Society. The population of elderly people is now increasing in Japan. Especially over 75 years old people is estimated to be up to 20 million in 2030. We have investigated in one of daycare centers which are facilities for elderly care. And we realized that communication is needed for its own sake in these facilities and active communication can cure even depression and dementia. Therefore we propose to cope with these problems using a robot as a communication activator in order to improve the effectiveness of group communication. We define group communication as one of the type of communication which is formed by several persons. This time, we focus on a recreation game named "Nandoku!' Nandoku is a type of quize which can be described as group communication with a master of ceremony (MC). In this paper, we describe requirement for this system and system design. The system always selects its behavior and target (a participant in the game) to maximize "communication activeness." Communication activeness is defined as amount of several subjects'(ordinary three: A, B, C) participation, which are calculated with participants' face direction using camera information. For instance, if participant A is not fully participating by not making eye contact, the system is expected to select one of the behaviors such as "Can you answer, Mr.A?" to encourage A to participate in the game. We experimented with the system in a daycare center. Our results show subjects' participation is totally increased. That otTers evidence that the robot can serve a practical role in improving the group communication as a communication activator.
Our community is facing serious Aging Society especially in Japan. We have investigated in one of daycare centers which are facilities for elderly care. As the result, we realized that communication is needed for its own sake in these facilities and active communication can cure even depression and dementia. Therefore we propose to cope with these problems using a robot as a communication activator in order to improve group communication. We define group communication as one of types of communication which is formed by several persons. This time, we focus on a recreation game named "Nandoku. " Nandoku is a quiz which can be described as group communication with a master of ceremony (MC). The system always selects its behavior and target (a participant in the game) to maximize "communication activeness. " Communication activeness is defined as amount of several panelists'(ordinary three: A, B, C) participation, which are calculated with panelists' face direction using camera information. For instance, if participant A is not fully participating by not making eye contact, the system is expected to select one of the behaviors such as "Can you answer, Mr.A?" to encourage A to participate in the game. We experimented with the system in a daycare center. As the result, obvious increase in participation was observed. That offers evidence that the robot can serve a practical role in improving the group communication as a communication activator especially for entertainment use.
Humanoid with spoken language communication ability is proposed and developed. To make humanoid live with people, spoken language communication is fundamental because we use this kind of communication everyday. However, due to difficulties of speech recognition itself and implementation on the robot, a robot with such an ability has not been developed. In this study, we propose a robot with the technique implemented to overcome these problems. This proposed system includes three key features, image processing, sound source separation, and turn-taking timing control. Processing image captured with camera mounted on the robot's eyes enables to find and identify whom the robot should talked to. Sound source separation enables distant speech recognition, so that people need no special device, such as head-set microphones. Turn-taking timing control is often lacked in many conventional spoken dialogue system, but this is fundamental because the conversation proceeds in realtime. The effectiveness of these elements as well as the example of conversation are shown in experiments.
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