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

Abstract

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.

An Automated Planning Model for HRI: Use Cases on Social Assistive Robotics

“…On the other hand, the plan created must be able to control the robot while performing both CGA tests and rehabilitation sessions in a similar way as the specific domains allowed. It is important to bear in mind that building specific models for each particular HRI task is the common approach found in the state-of-the-art [ 4 , 5 , 6 ], so the aim of the proposed evaluation is to check if that specific domains can be replaced by a single one keeping reaction times and making the robot to externally behave in the same way.…”

“…Social robots [ 1 ] must autonomously interact with people on dynamic and uncertain environments. A common way to control such robots is the use of finite-state machines (FSM) [ 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ], where each state corresponds to a certain situation during the interaction, and transitions between states depend both on actions performed by the robot and information received by sensors. FSMs are simple and fast mechanisms to control the robot, particularly in structured environments, but, in more sophisticated applications, to identify and correctly specify all possible states that could appear and the transitions among them can be a really hard task.…”

“…To the authors’ knowledge, there are no such general planning models for robot-driven HRI in the literature. All other approaches, either using automated planning or other control techniques, rely on ad-hoc models, created for the HRI task at hand and difficult to generalize even for close related tasks [ 2 , 4 , 5 , 6 ].…”

A Low-Cost Assistive Robot for Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders to Aid in Daily Living Activities

“…With respect to the integration of action recognition solutions in ARDs, different studies revealed that this capability is fundamental for the interactions with the users [ 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 ]. Most of the approaches need a set of sensors to be installed in the home of the user, e.g., [ 30 , 31 , 32 ].…”

“…Finally, some works offer a real-time action recognition capability using the cameras installed directly within the robotic platforms [ 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 ].…”