Exercising with Baxter: preliminary support for assistive social-physical human-robot interaction

Abstract

Background: The worldwide population of older adults will soon exceed the capacity of assisted living facilities. Accordingly, we aim to understand whether appropriately designed robots could help older adults stay active at home. Methods: Building on related literature as well as guidance from experts in game design, rehabilitation, and physical and occupational therapy, we developed eight human-robot exercise games for the Baxter Research Robot, six of which involve physical human-robot contact. After extensive iteration, these games were tested in an exploratory user study including 20 younger adult and 20 older adult users. Results: Only socially and physically interactive games fell in the highest ranges for pleasantness, enjoyment, engagement, cognitive challenge, and energy level. Our games successfully spanned three different physical, cognitive, and temporal challenge levels. User trust and confidence in Baxter increased significantly between pre-and post-study assessments. Older adults experienced higher exercise, energy, and engagement levels than younger adults, and women rated the robot more highly than men on several survey questions. Conclusions:The results indicate that social-physical exercise with a robot is more pleasant, enjoyable, engaging, cognitively challenging, and energetic than similar interactions that lack physical touch. In addition to this main finding, researchers working in similar areas can build on our design practices, our open-source resources, and the age-group and gender differences that we found.

A robot goes to rehab: a novel gamified system for long-term stroke rehabilitation using a socially assistive robot—methodology and usability testing

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In the Arms of a Robot: Designing Autonomous Hugging Robots with Intra-Hug Gestures

“…Several researchers have devoted effort to enabling robots to shake hands with humans as naturally as humans do with each other, e.g., [7,77]. Other researchers have worked to allow humans to connect with robots in a more light-hearted and playful manner through high-fives and hand-clapping games [31][32][33]. All these interactions feature ways to help humans and robots interact with each other both socially and physically.…”

Medical and Assistive Robotics in Global Health

“…The robot's ability to monitor the patient movement is important to ensure compliance while its ability to give feedback and supporting cueing is important to ensure engagement. Studies show these robots are able to motivate and engage the patient to continue to pursue therapy outside hospital settings (Matarić et al 2007;Miskam et al 2013;Fitter et al 2020). Examples of robots used in this manner are the NAO (Softbank, Japan), Pepper (Softbank, Japan), Baxter (Rethink Robotics, USA), and Bandit (BlueSky Robotics, USA).…”

“…A more affordable version of this system, called Lil Flo, is in development as a telerehabilitation research tool (Sobrepera et al 2020). The Baxter, a human-size commercial humanoid robot with two 7 DOF arms, has been used as a physically social assisting therapy robot to guide old and young users in physical-social interactive tasks as stretching, hand clapping, and boxing (Fitter et al 2020).…”