BACKGROUND Many studies have shown that robots can provide medical help to patients, such as supporting physical movements, managing mood, or simulating cognitive function. However, robotic cognitive/language assessment, which is vital for mental health care, has not been fully explored and is limited to only a few types of assessment. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study is to present and evaluate a social robot equipped with a web-based language assessment for sentence comprehension test (SCT) with a dialogue system involving yes/no questions. METHODS A total of 50 participants took a SCT with 36 items conducted by a robot (robot SCT), while a total of 55 participants took the same test but conducted by a human examiner (human SCT). Comparative analyses were performed to evaluate the feasibility of the robot SCT in terms of SCT score and time-related measures. The system usability score (SUS) and interview feedback were also analyzed to assess the usability of the robot SCT. RESULTS In terms of the feasibility of the robot SCT, the SCT scores showed that there was no significant difference between the robot SCT and human SCT group. Also, there were conditional differences in reaction time for the test items, similar to that of the paper-and-pencil SCT in previous research. The high SUS scores (i.e., mean 78.5, SD 11) demonstrated the high usability of the robot SCT. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrates the feasibility and usability of robotic language assessment among normal individuals. Further evaluation is needed in people with dementia or mild cognitive impairment.
Channel bandwidth in 3G communication networks is very much limited for video telephony services. Therefore, it is worthwhile to enhance a subjective quality of video contents via ROI based coding. In this paper, An ROI/xROI based rate-control method is proposed, which considers the coding of both the ROI and the extended ROIs (xROI's) in non-ROI to meet given target bitrates. In the proposed method, the QP values are increasingly assigned in MB wide inside the non-ROI away from ROI. This reduces the abrupt change in visual quality and the amounts of residual signals along the border between ROI and non-ROI. In this regard, the subjective visual quality is enhanced as well as the proposed rate control has flexibility to control the amounts of the output bitstreams. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can more effectively achieve the average target bitrates with the better subjective quality than the existing rate control algorithm in H.264|AVC by reducing the variation of the output bitstream amounts.
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