Challenges in Designing a Fully Autonomous Socially Assistive Robot for People with Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

Assistive robots are becoming an increasingly important application platform for research in robotics, AI, and HRI, as there is a pressing need to develop systems that support the elderly and people with disabilities, with a clear path to market. Yet, what remains unclear is whether current autonomous systems are already up to the task or whether additional HRI work is needed to make these systems acceptable and useful. In this article, we report our efforts of developing and evaluating an architecture for a fully autonomous robot designed to assist older adults with Parkinson's disease (PD) in sorting their medications. The main goal for the robot is to aid users in a manner that maintains the autonomy of the user by providing cognitive and social support with varying levels of assistance. We first evaluated the robot with subjects drawn from a pool of university students, which is common practice in experimental work in psychology and HRI. As the results were very positive, we followed up with an evaluation using people with Parkinson's disease, who surprisingly had mostly negative outcomes. We thus report our analysis of the differences in the evaluations and discuss the challenges for HRI posed by the sources of the negative evaluations: (1) designing a robot to adapt to the many routines the participants use at home, (2) unique needs of participants with PD not present in student participants, and (3) the role of familiar technologies in designing and evaluating a new technology. While it is unlikely, given the current state of technology, that fully autonomous assistive robots for older adults will be available in the near term, we believe that our work exposes a critical need in HRI to involve the target population as early as possible in the design process. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Natural language interfaces; • Computing methodologies → Cognitive robotics; Robotic planning; • Social and professional topics → Assistive technologies;

Enabling a Social Robot to Process Social Cues to Detect when to Help a User

“…In developing these skills, it is often assumed that the robot has a mechanism to determine when to help the user and thus the focus is on how the robot would assist. However, recognizing the appropriate times to for a robot to assist can be critical to providing a quality user experience while also protecting the autonomy of the user (Wilson, Tickle-Degnen, and Scheutz 2020).…”

Enabling AI and Robotic Coaches for Physical Rehabilitation Therapy: Iterative Design and Evaluation with Therapists and Post-Stroke Survivors

“…from planning to conducting a session) and assumes that the end-user will initiate interaction with a system. In addition, no solutions have been widely adopted [39,56,55].…”

“…the effect of physical embodiment [13], matching the style of interaction with user's personality [49]), and shown a positive impact on patient's engagement and motivation [47,19]. However, even if prior work has demonstrated the feasibility of specific functionalities of AI and robotic exercise coaches, it is still challenging to adopt these systems broadly [39,56,55]. These challenges include safety, clinical effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, usability [41].…”

“…These challenges include safety, clinical effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, usability [41]. With respect to usability, the focus of this paper, prior work discusses a need of involving the target stakeholders in an early design phase [56,55] to understand their perspectives on the real-world context and design AI and robotic coaches more acceptable in practice [4].…”

A Knowledge Driven Approach to Adaptive Assistance Using Preference Reasoning and Explanation

“…While previous work demonstrated the robot adapting its assistance based on how much assistance the person needed (Wilson, Tickle-Degnen, and Scheutz 2020), the current work looks at how the robot can reason about the person's preferences, thus adapting its assistance and explanation.…”