Smart-Home Environment to Support Homework Activities for Children

Abstract

The Central Nervous System of humans continuously evolves when children engage in new activities. These activities are progressing from learning to eat as a baby over playing during childhood up to homework in all its dimensions. These activities, which are meaningful and relevant to everyone, constitute what occupational therapists call "occupations". The successful execution of these occupations makes the development of new roles as well as the construction of a correct state of health possible. Due to these reasons, occupational performance is a fundamental part of development throughout childhood. Homework is complex and extends beyond the school context to the home. For many children, the performance of these homework items is a difficult challenge or even impossible to overcome without the help of an adult. This article presents the design, implementation, and functional validation of an intelligent home environment that uses homework activities as a support tool for children with or without attention disabilities. In this project, the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is combined with the development of robotic assistance to implement an intelligent home environment. In this environment, we have included intelligent things (where the usual study chairs and desks become smart objects) that determine in real-time the child's behavior during the development of homework and a robotic assistant which interacts with the children providing the necessary accompaniment (supervision and guidelines) just as a therapist would do. This development has been functionally validated by tests on several school-aged children without pathologies. In a later phase of the study, the proposal will be validated with children with different pathologies with an impact on learning, including Attention Disorder Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The goal is the generation of intelligent places for therapeutic purposes within the home as assistance for children having difficulties to work with their homework assignment due to ADHD.

Design of Smart Home Service Robot Based on ROS

“…Reference [13] Speech recognition, human-computer interaction * * Reference [15] Wireless control * Reference [16] Robot walking (balanced walking motion) * *…”

“…e results show that the robot can perform various forms of actions to answer user queries [12]. Berrezueta-Guzman et al [13] introduced the design of smart home environment. In this project, the Internet of ings (IoT) paradigm is combined with the development of robotic aids to realize a smart home environment.…”

Assessment of a Robotic Assistant for Supporting Homework Activities of Children With ADHD

“…The continued development of the project [12] is shown as the background of this study. This project includes the implementation of a Smart-home environment, combining robotic assistance and IoT to support ADHD therapy processes inside the patient's home.…”

“…For the development of these therapies, it is necessary to transfer the child to specialized clinics which provide environments like home, school, etc. It includes the evaluation of the child to determine specific difficulties and therefore being able to propose an individualized intervention [12].…”

“…Finally, [12] develops a RA called Atent@ which interacts with the children during the homework sessions inside their home. The human-robot interaction allows the monitoring and improvement of the behavior of these children [38].…”