Exploring use cases for telepresence robots

IntroductionOur aging population presents new challenges for the economy and healthcare systems particularly as the number of caregivers per elderly is expected to decrease (e.g. Acosta-Calderon, 2011;Michaud et al., 2007; United Nations, 2006). The fields of telemedicine and telecare have the potential to provide solutions which are particularly attractive for countries with low population densities. In such countries, social isolation could decrease the possibility of elderly people to remain independent and therefore, increase their need for institutional care. While technology can be of help, the uptake of solutions will be highly dependent on the conviction that the technology meets the needs of elderly as well as primary and secondary caregivers while maintaining adequate quality of care. In order to ensure that developed solutions meet the needs of a diverse group of end users, a common approach is to perform extensive end user evaluations to assess the attitude from elderly and/or caregivers. The caregiver and healthcare professionals in particular are an important group as their willingness to accept new technology is determinant in providing the technology to the elderly and ensuring that it is used. In this regards it is therefore important to consider the high variations in professions and roles of primary caregivers when assessing their feedback. In addition, within the different professional roles, there are also differences that depend on experience, age, work processes and tools, exposure to technology etc.In this study we consider an organizational perspective in the evaluation of a technology solution which has not yet penetrated the market but is seen as a close to market solution, if meeting the requirements of end-users (primary and secondary). The system that is evaluated is Giraff, a system for social robotic telepresence. The Giraff in Fig. 1 provides a means for achieving remote communication between two parties. The communication shares similarities with a traditional phone call, i.e. a call is made and this is either accepted or rejected by the owner of the robot. On one end, there is a 163 cm high robot and on the other end there is a client interface from which a remote user can pilot the robot while speaking through a microphone and a web camera. The Giraff unit consists of a screen and web camera that are mounted on a tilt unit attached to the robotic base. .The Giraff also has its own charging station to which the remote user docks before terminating a call. The owner of a Giraff is not required to have any technological knowledge since the handling of the Giraff is done remotely, (see Fig. 2). INS FIG. 1 and FIG. 2 In the evaluation study of the Giraff robot, we consider three categories of primary caregivers (audiologists, nurses and occupational therapists). Within each category we focus on two groups, teachers and students. The evaluation is conducted by presenting a video where a scenario in which Giraff was used to communicate with an elderly was shown to the various evaluat...

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“…physically embodied videoconferencing systems studied in a coworker perspective include e.g. Lee &Tsui, Desai, Yanco, andUhlik (2011).…”

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confidence: 99%

An Exploratory Study of Health Professionals' Attitudes about Robotic Telepresence Technology

Kristoffersson

Coradeschi

Loutfi

et al. 2011

Journal of Technology in Human Services

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“…Regardless of level of autonomy, human-environment interaction is modeled as mediated through the robot. While this is technically correct in the case of telerobotics (which was the main topic of the research in (Sheridan, 1992)), systems for telepresence (Minsky, 1980;Tsui et al, 2011) aim at creating the illusion of direct interaction, and the interaction models should therefore reflect this fact.…”

Section: Modeling Hrimentioning

confidence: 99%

3D Human Pose Tracking Priors using Geodesic Mixture Models

2016

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Abstract:In many complex robotics systems, interaction takes place in all directions between human, robot, and environment. Performance of such a system depends on this interaction, and a proper evaluation of a system must build on a proper modeling of interaction, a relevant set of performance metrics, and a methodology to combine metrics into a single performance value. In this paper, existing models of human-robot interaction are adapted to fit complex scenarios with one or several humans and robots. The interaction and the evaluation process is formalized, and a general method to fuse performance values over time and for several performance metrics is presented. The resulting value, denoted interaction quality, adds a dimension to ordinary performance metrics by being explicit about the interplay between performance metrics, and thereby provides a formal framework to understand, model, and address complex aspects of evaluation of human-robot interaction.

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“…However, in most service robot applications, the GUI is a dominant part of the robot behavior, since the user experience highly depends on the audio visual output and the interactions with the robot. In most service robots available in the market, touch screens are used as the main mode of interaction [25].…”

Section: B Combining Robot Actions User Inputs and The Graphical Usmentioning

confidence: 99%

An efficient programming framework for socially assistive robots based on separation of robot behavior description from execution

Jayawardena

Kuo

MacDonald

2013

2013 6th IEEE Conference on Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics (RAM)

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Abstract-One of the main challenges in socially assistive robotics is providing flexible and easy-to-use programming tools for users. Unlike other robots, designing socially assistive robots includes the subject-matter-experts (SMEs) from nonengineering disciplines. Therefore, the provided tools should be suitable for users with less programming experience. On the other hand, socially assistive robotic research involves field trials and user-centric studies, in which user and subject matter expert comments are used to improve the robot applications. Therefore, field programmability and customizability are key requirements. This paper presents a programming framework for socially assistive robots, which satisfies the above requirements; programmability by non-experts, field programmability and customizability. The proposed framework has been successfully implemented, deployed, and tested. Some robots with the framework presented in this paper are already in the commercialization pathway.

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Exploring use cases for telepresence robots

Cited by 199 publications

References 15 publications

An Exploratory Study of Health Professionals' Attitudes about Robotic Telepresence Technology

An Exploratory Study of Health Professionals' Attitudes about Robotic Telepresence Technology

3D Human Pose Tracking Priors using Geodesic Mixture Models

An efficient programming framework for socially assistive robots based on separation of robot behavior description from execution

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