Auto-evaluation of motion imitation in a child-robot imitation game for upper arm rehabilitation

Abstract

The purpose of this study is fusing play-like child robot interaction with physiotherapy in order to achieve upper arm rehabilitation by motivating the child. The proposed system is not intended to substitute for the physiotherapist, but to assist them in their therapeutic tasks by encouraging the child's participation in the activity. Recognizing the imitation performance of the child and supporting him/her with feedback for drawing the child's attention and motivating the child to imitate the robot is crucial. This study concentrates on automatically evaluating the upper body actions of the child during an imitation based physical therapy. For quantifying the performance of the child, two measures were considered: Range of Motion (RoM) and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance. In our initial experiments, eight healthy children were asked to stand in front of a Kinect sensor and to mimic the actions of the humanoid robot Nao, which consist of shoulder abduction, shoulder vertical flexion&extension and elbow flexion. The proposed evaluation measure is verified as a reliable measurement according to Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) through comparison with evaluations of five physiotherapists as ground truth. The degree of consistency among our ratings and the physiotherapist ratings is between %76 and %96 for different motions.

Children’s Rehabilitation with Humanoid Robots and Wearable Inertial Measurement Units

“…In the session, the robot performed the selected physiotherapy actions and the child imitated the robot. The success of imitation was measured by processing the skeleton joint angles of the child obtained by Kinect and grading the similarity [5]. Initial experiments were carried out with healthy children in an upper body physiotherapy imitation scenario.…”

“…In order to achieve interactive engagement that catches the child's attention and to motivate the child to imitate the robot in a rehabilitation session, the robot should recognize the actions of the child and provide feedback accordingly. Calculating similarity between the motions of the child and robot is crucial in order to provide a proper feedback in any physical therapy [5].…”

Therapy Monitoring and Patient Evaluation with Social Robots

“…However, automatic patient evaluation using clinical metric is not their main objective. For example, a similar approach to NAOTherapist is taken in [8], where NAO robots and a Microsoft Kinect camera are the elements in common. The authors tackle the patient evaluation problem recording videos that afterwards are revised by the therapists, which are required to fill manually a simple metric designed by the authors.…”

The Sound of Actuators: Disturbance in Human - Robot Interactions?

“…Emergence of synchrony can be observed in rhythmic tasks but also for discrete movements such as "pick and place". Human-Robot coordination or imitation is a privileged research subject in socially assistive robotics and beyond proposing new frameworks for coordination [1], it has been widely used with a therapeutic goal, particularly for autistic children [2], [3], but also for motor rehabilitation [4] since rhythm therapy is one of the most effective therapies for Parkinson, cerebral palsy, autism... Most studies justify the use of robots with the enhanced engagement demonstrated by children with robots compared to the one with humans.…”