Growing Old with Socially Assistive Robots: Intelligent Robots that can Help with Everyday Tasks

As the demands on health and social care increase so too does the pressure on the carers we rely on to provide that care. However, as demand increase we risk placing too much burden on the care sector. This talk discusses the deployment of a humanoid robot to a day center catering for guests suffering with dementia with the aim of supporting the center staff to run group activities.

Exploring the Applicability of the Socially Assistive Robot Stevie in a Day Center for People with Dementia

Over the course of the coming decades, the societal goal of maximizing the number of older adults who experience positive trajectories of ageing has been established. To this end, innovative technologybased interventions tailored to older adults’ functional levels and focused on healthy lifestyles are considered imperative. The purpose of this work is to present a cluster of digital solutions aims at supporting and maintaining healthy and independent living for older adults, who face permanently or temporarily reduced functionality and capabilities.

Assistive Technologies for Supporting Wellbeing of Older Adults

As the field of robotics develops, so do the methods of interfacing with and controlling those robots. Many modern robots can be communicated with using commands that require neither speech nor touch. The two main motivations behind this trend are the assistance of people with disabilities and the desire for more natural Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). In allowing nonverbal communication with robots, accessibility of the systems increases to allow more people to interact with and benefit from robotics systems. Additionally, nonverbal communication provides more natural communication, which can lead to many benefits in HRI. This paper
provides an overview of existing technologies in touchless and nonverbal human-robot interfaces; it presents the most prevalent interface methods, their uses, and limitations. Discussions are provided on future directions for research.

Interfacing with Robots without the use of Touch or Speech

We are presenting a conceptual design of a post-stroke rehabilitation
device, which is aimed for training the coupled movement
of wrist and fingers from flexion to extension in three modalities –
passive, active-assisted and active mode of operation. We will describe the configuration, actuation and control system of the
robotic device and provide the results of the mechanism’s mock-up
evaluation, therapists’ feedback on the design, future work and
development plans.

Robotic device for wrist and finger exercise

As access to new technologies becomes increasingly less expensive and complex, technologies such as virtual reality (VR) are also becoming interesting and relevant for applications outside consumer entertainment. Especially with VR for blind and visually impaired people, VR can overcome the limitations of real-world environments (e.g., hazardous locations and reliance on sighted companionship for training) by virtually exploring its digital model using consumer hardware. In this context, we conducted two within-subject user study with 11 and 5 participants that were asked to learn and re-walk an audio-landmark enriched path in a virtual environment. Our results showed, that the ability to learn and re-walk an audio landmark-enriched environment using an auditive only locomotion interface is possible, but yet difficult. To be able to re-walk even a simple corridor entails a relatively big training effort, but distinctive structures are recognizable again. The results also indicated that the intuitive use of controller based locomotion brings advantages over a keyboard and mouse based approach. Furthermore, we discovered different characteristics of auditive navigation (e.g., walking zigzag, in circles or collision-oriented with regard to the rooms' walls), encountered acoustic rendering problems in acute corners and were able to show a training effect when having trained a path within a virtual environment with respect to re-walking, both inside a virtual environment and outside to a physically re-walked path. This work underlines the feasibility, problems, but also chances of different locomotion implementations in VR and is intended to foster future work towards both technical and methodological optimization in this area.

Preliminary Analysis on Interaction Characteristics with Auditive Navigation in Virtual Environments

In a pandemic crisis such as the one that the world has been experiencing since January 2020, utilizing remote mobile health monitoring can help monitor the cardiac health of healthy individuals as well as chronically ill patients. Apple Watch is a fitness tracker that measures heart rate and can facilitate this need due to its availability worldwide and relative affordability. Hence, it has the potential of being useful in assessing and monitoring one’s cardiac health. This paper reports the preliminary results from an ongoing study aimed at assessing the accuracy of the Apple Watch in measuring heart rate variability. To achieve the goal of the study, concurrent measurements of electrocardiogram (ECG), as a gold standard, and instantaneous Apple Watch heartrate values were made in six (4 male) age 26.4±3.2 years old volunteer healthy subjects. Both time and frequency domain measures of heartrate variability (HRV) were obtained from the recorded ECG and estimated from the Apple Watch instantaneous heartrate values. The results indicate that it may be possible to obtain a reasonable estimate of HRV time-domain and frequency-domain metrics using Apple Watch in healthy subjects.

Estimation of Heart Rate Variability Measures Using Apple Watch and Evaluating Their Accuracy

The analysis of large data sets for several purposes is a growing requirement for many professions. Tactile charts are suitable to enable people with visual impairment and blindness performing data analysis tasks. However, few approaches focus on the development of tactile charts for data analysis purposes. Concepts are needed to enable the representation of a sufficient amount of data with tactile charts and to address arising challenges, such as information overload. In this paper, we first discuss and analyse the scalability of data represented by tactile charts, using the example of tactile scatterplots. We further address the data size limitations and propose a workflow for identifying critical, tactile representation with limited readability respecting the analysis task. Moreover, we propose concepts to increase the represented amount of data in tactile scatterplots. Based on our analysis results, we introduce tactile heatmaps as an innovative and new concept to represent data
for the haptic sense. Therefore, we developed a design for tactile heatmaps by utilising different elevation levels. We evaluated the concept as well as the feasibility of different elevation levels with 11 blind and visually impaired people. Four design conditions for embossed tactile heatmaps were compared. We further evaluated
the suitability of 3D-printed heatmaps. The results show that tactile heatmaps are suitable for representing more data than previously known tactile representation methods. They support obtaining an overview of a high amount of data and can be applied for data analysis purposes.

Tactile Heatmaps: A Novel Visualisation Technique for Data Analysis with Tactile Charts

Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) is a disease affecting premature infants and may lead to childhood blindness. Due to lack of trained ophthalmologists, developing a fully automated ROP diagnostic system can significantly benefit the infants affected by ROP. Based on manually segmented features, previous work produces severity scores for ROP with excellent prediction accuracy. However, when automated segmentation employed, a significant accuracy drop is observed. In this paper, we show that U-Net segmentation, which is automated, comes at no accuracy loss.

Automated ROP Diagnostic System based on Comparisons and U-Net Segmentation

In pandemic times, public facilities, such as gymnasiums and other sports facilities are closed. Hence, keeping oneself physically fit becomes particularly difficult as well as getting help from a fitness trainer or instructor is almost impossible. We propose an alternative solution, GymSoles++, a virtual trainer supporting the user with their exercise. This allows users to maintain the correct body posture to avoid injuries when performing exercises such as squats. We combine Google Glass with an unobtrusive sensing approach, an insole-based wearable system that provides feedback on the user's centre of pressure (CoP) via vibrotactile and visual aids. Previous research has shown that solely visualizing the CoP can significantly improve body posture and thus effectively assist users when performing squats and dead-lifts. In this research, we explored different feedback modalities and conclude that a vibrotactile insole is a practical and effective solution.

Combining Google Glass with Smart Insoles to Improve Body Posture when Performing Squats

Due to the rapid development of information technology, health monitoring research demands are growing tremendously. People prefer to use wearable devices that consist of sensors, which help in monitoring the health of individuals. This study aims to develop a system that remotely monitors the physiological aspects of individuals, such as blood oxygen saturation and pulse measurement, using wearable sensors and a new cloud-based fuzzy logic system, and generates necessary alarms. Monitoring health remotely based on wearable and non-invasive sensors provides a cost-effective solution, which in turn permits the elderly people to continue to live in his/her home environment as opposed to spending on expensive healthcare facilities. The developed system shall permit smooth physiological monitoring of an individual’s health by healthcare personnel in real-time. The developed system will not only assess health conditions but also provide feedback from distant facilities.
Moreover, the developed rule-based fuzzy system can infer an individual’s health condition. The study uses pulse rate and oxygen saturation data, which are processed by a fuzzy system on the cloud, and the acquired results are displayed on a mobile application.

A cloud-based pervasive application for monitoring oxygen saturation and heart rate using fuzzy-as-a-service

People with severe motor impairment oftentimes rely on unconventional assistive interfaces to complete daily activities. In this work, we developed a holistic shared control framework to help them achieve fast and accurate indoor navigation using low throughput human machine interfaces.
Based off our previously developed shared position control method,
we added orientation control, action control, and a state machine architecture to create the new framework NOVELTI 2.0.
The framework provides generic support for various LTIs. We validated the framework using Emotiv EPOC headset and a single-switch interface.
A comprehensive comparative study involving 10 human subjects navigating a wheelchair in a real indoor environment demonstrated that our framework could 
achieve high navigation accuracy about 0.05 m for position and 5 degrees for orientation.
Compared to steering control, our method required half the navigation time and half the number of commands in routes longer than 20 m.
The NASA TLX survey results also indicated lower subjective workload with our method.
Experimental data is provided for download and future evaluation.

Underline digital video library

Growing Old with Socially Assistive Robots: Intelligent Robots that can Help with Everyday Tasks

Exploring the Applicability of the Socially Assistive Robot Stevie in a Day Center for People with Dementia

Assistive Technologies for Supporting Wellbeing of Older Adults

Interfacing with Robots without the use of Touch or Speech

Robotic device for wrist and finger exercise

Preliminary Analysis on Interaction Characteristics with Auditive Navigation in Virtual Environments

Estimation of Heart Rate Variability Measures Using Apple Watch and Evaluating Their Accuracy

Tactile Heatmaps: A Novel Visualisation Technique for Data Analysis with Tactile Charts

Automated ROP Diagnostic System based on Comparisons and U-Net Segmentation

Combining Google Glass with Smart Insoles to Improve Body Posture when Performing Squats

A cloud-based pervasive application for monitoring oxygen saturation and heart rate using fuzzy-as-a-service

NOVELTI2.0: Enhanced Assistive Robot Navigation with Low Throughput Interfaces

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