Social Human-Robot Interaction for the Elderly

Zlatintsi, Athanasia; Rodomagoulakis, Isidoros; Pitsikalis, Vassilis; Koutras, Petros; Kardaris, Nikolaos; Papageorgiou, Xanthi S.; Tzafestas, Costas S.; Maragos, Petros

doi:10.1145/3029798.3038400

Cited by 13 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…To illustrate the lack of cohesive jargon in the field, the following concepts were encountered during a literature search: socially assistive robots (e.g., Tapus and Mataric 2008;Khaksar et al 2015), mental commit robots (e.g., Wada et al 2003), social robots (e.g., Bartl et al 2016), and care robots (Jenkins and Draper 2015), etc. Though a cohesive conceptualization is yet to be formulated, one can observe a rough distinction between play based/motivational robots that are supposed to enhance cognitive function and/or social interaction (e.g., Wada et al 2003), and robots that are specifically used for pragmatic care related purposes (e.g., Zlatintsi et al 2017). This observation is also aligned with health policy literature on elder care, in which caregiving is considered both a social and a pragmatic activity (Pavolini and Ranci 2013).…”

Section: Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A critical analysis of the representations of older adults in the field of human–robot interaction

Burema

2021

AI & Soc

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This paper argues that there is a need to critically assess bias in the representations of older adults in the field of Human–Robot Interaction. This need stems from the recognition that technology development is a socially constructed process that has the potential to reinforce problematic understandings of older adults. Based on a qualitative content analysis of 96 academic publications, this paper indicates that older adults are represented as; frail by default, independent by effort; silent and technologically illiterate; burdensome; and problematic for society. Within these documents, few counternarratives are present that do not take such essentialist representations. In these texts, the goal of social robots in elder care is to “enable” older adults to “better” themselves. The older body is seen as “fixable” with social robots, reinforcing an ageist and neoliberal narrative: older adults are reduced to potential care receivers in ways that shift care responsibilities away from the welfare state onto the individual.

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Section: Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A critical analysis of the representations of older adults in the field of human–robot interaction

Burema

2021

AI & Soc

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“…The concept behind these algorithms is to design interaction techniques that will enhance the communication making it natural and intuitive, enabling robots to understand, interact and respond to human intentions intelligently. For a review, we refer the reader to [24,25,26,27,28,29].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

I-Support: A robotic platform of an assistive bathing robot for the elderly population

Zlatintsi

Dometios

Kardaris

et al. 2020

Robotics and Autonomous Systems

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In this paper we present a prototype integrated robotic system, the I-Support bathing robot, that aims at supporting new aspects of assisted daily-living activities on a real-life scenario. The paper focuses on describing and evaluating key novel technological features of the system, with the emphasis on cognitive human-robot interaction modules and their evaluation through a series of clinical validation studies. The I-Support project on its whole has envisioned the development of an innovative, modular, ICTsupported service robotic system that assists frail seniors to safely and independently complete an entire sequence of physically and cognitively demanding bathing tasks, such as properly washing their back and their lower limbs. A variety of innovative technologies have been researched and a set of advanced modules of sensing, cognition, actuation and control have been developed and seamlessly integrated to enable the system to adapt to the target population abilities. These technologies include: human activity monitoring and recognition, adaptation of a motorized chair for safe transfer of the elderly in and out the bathing cabin, a context awareness system that provides full environmental awareness, as well as a prototype soft robotic arm and a set of user-adaptive robot motion planning and control algorithms. This paper focuses in particular on the multimodal action recognition system, developed to monitor, analyze and predict user actions with a high level of accuracy and detail in real-time, which are then interpreted as robotic tasks. In the same framework, the analysis of human actions that have become available through the project's multimodal audio-gestural dataset, has led to the successful modelling of Human-Robot Communication, achieving an effective and natural interaction between users and the assistive robotic platform. In order to evaluate the I-Support system, two multinational validation studies were conducted under realistic operating conditions in two clinical pilot sites. Some of the findings of these studies are presented and analysed in the paper, showing good results in terms of: (i) high acceptability regarding the system usability by this particularly challenging target group, the elderly end-users, and (ii) overall task effectiveness of the system in different operating modes.

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“…One such area concerns the development of multimodal interfaces, required to facilitate natural HRI, including visual RGB/Depth and audio input, for multimodal human-robot interactions. The concept behind these systems is to design robots and interaction techniques that will enhance the communication making it natural and intuitive, so as the robots are able to understand, interact and respond to human intentions intelligently; for a review, we refer the reader to [2,3,4,5,6,7,8].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multimodal Signal Processing and Learning Aspects of Human-Robot Interaction for an Assistive Bathing Robot

Zlatintsi

Rodomagoulakis

Koutras

et al. 2018

2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

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We explore new aspects of assistive living on smart human-robot interaction (HRI) that involve automatic recognition and online validation of speech and gestures in a natural interface, providing social features for HRI. We introduce a whole framework and resources of a real-life scenario for elderly subjects supported by an assistive bathing robot, addressing health and hygiene care issues. We contribute a new dataset and a suite of tools used for data acquisition and a state-of-the-art pipeline for multimodal learning within the framework of the I-Support bathing robot, with emphasis on audio and RGB-D visual streams. We consider privacy issues by evaluating the depth visual stream along with the RGB, using Kinect sensors. The audio-gestural recognition task on this new dataset yields up to 84.5%, while the online validation of the I-Support system on elderly users accomplishes up to 84% when the two modalities are fused together. The results are promising enough to support further research in the area of multimodal recognition for assistive social HRI, considering the difficulties of the specific task. Upon acceptance of the paper part of the data will be publicly available.

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Social Human-Robot Interaction for the Elderly

Cited by 13 publications

References 8 publications

A critical analysis of the representations of older adults in the field of human–robot interaction

A critical analysis of the representations of older adults in the field of human–robot interaction

I-Support: A robotic platform of an assistive bathing robot for the elderly population

Multimodal Signal Processing and Learning Aspects of Human-Robot Interaction for an Assistive Bathing Robot

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