An Informationally Structured Room for Robotic Assistance

Abstract

The application of assistive technologies for elderly people is one of the most promising and interesting scenarios for intelligent technologies in the present and near future. Moreover, the improvement of the quality of life for the elderly is one of the first priorities in modern countries and societies. In this work, we present an informationally structured room that is aimed at supporting the daily life activities of elderly people. This room integrates different sensor modalities in a natural and non-invasive way inside the environment. The information gathered by the sensors is processed and sent to a centralized management system, which makes it available to a service robot assisting the people. One important restriction of our intelligent room is reducing as much as possible any interference with daily activities. Finally, this paper presents several experiments and situations using our intelligent environment in cooperation with our service robot.

Robot–City Interaction: Mapping the Research Landscape—A Survey of the Interactions Between Robots and Modern Cities

“…Figure 12 show how robots interact with their surrounding geographical space (the land). Expectedly, backstage spaces are less common in RCI scenarios, followed by secure spaces and special spaces such as hospitals [39,103], construction sites [76,86,89] and underground city infrastructures [48,75].…”

“…hospitals). Works in this area range from intelligent systems and software architectures testing and simulating how robots communicate with intelligent environments [55,103] and perform assistive-specific tasks [10,83], to real-world appli-cations where mobile platforms are continuously operating autonomously [39,45,69].…”

Employment, Disabled People and Robots: What Is the Narrative in the Academic Literature and Canadian Newspapers?

“…One article just mentioned that these devices might be useful for work [44]. Many articles were focusing on enabling daily rather than work related tasks of disabled people (for example [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54]) or products that help disabled people (for example [55]). One exploratory study covered "the use of standard occupational therapy assessment tests to measure the effective manipulation ability of individuals with disabilities using a robotic aid" [56].…”

Human-Computer Interaction in Smart Environments

“…In particular, the Special Issue gathers together 22 papers concerning current research efforts focused on human-computer interaction (HCI) through natural and intuitive modalities including hand/body gestures [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ], face recognition [ 7 , 8 ], gaze/eye tracking [ 4 , 9 , 10 ], biosignal analysis [ 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 ], speech recognition [ 16 ], activity recognition [ 17 , 18 ] and their related issues. Moreover, the Special Issue contains papers related to the architectural design of smart environments [ 19 , 20 ], with a particular focus on the exploitation of sensors for gathering information related to the environment [ 21 , 22 ]. In the following, an overview of the papers included in the Special Issue is provided, by summarizing their main contribution to the state-of-the-art.…”

“…Some works published in this Special Issue deal with the exploitation of sensors for improving human-robot interaction (HRI) [ 6 , 16 , 21 ]. The underlying idea is that, by relying on information acquired through different sensors, it could be possible to enable a more natural interaction.…”