Externalising moods and psychological states in a cloud based system to enhance a pet-robot and child’s interaction

Background:This PATRICIA research project is about using pet robots to reduce pain and anxiety in hospitalized children. The study began 2 years ago and it is believed that the advances made in this project are significant. Patients, parents, nurses, psycholo- gists, and engineers have adopted the Pleo robot, a baby dinosaur robotic pet, which works in different ways to assist children during hospitalization. Methods: Focus is spent on creating a wireless communication system with the Pleo in order to help the coordinator, who conducts therapy with the child, monitor, under- stand, and control Pleo’s behavior at any moment. This article reports how this techno- logical function is being developed and tested. Results: Wireless communication between the Pleo and an Android device is achieved. The developed Android app allows the user to obtain any state of the robot without stopping its interaction with the patient. Moreover, information is sent to a cloud, so that robot moods, states and interactions can be shared among different robots. Conclusions: Pleo attachment was successful for more than 1 month, working with children in therapy, which makes the investment capable of positive therapeutic possibilities. This technical improvement in the Pleo addresses two key issues in social robotics: needing an enhanced response to maintain the attention and engagement of the child, and using the system as a platform to collect the states of the child’s progress for clinical purposes.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Social Media: the Wild West of CSR Communications

Purpose - The central argument that this paper posits is that traditional media of old presented a clear, ordered world of communication management for organisations to extol their CSR credentials. In contrast to this, new Web 2.0 social media is increasingly being used by activists and hactivists to challenge corporate communication CSR messages and does so by highlighting instances and examples of Corporate Social Irresponsibility (CSI) (Jones, Bowd and Tench, 2009; Tench, Sun and Jones, 2012). Design/methodology/approach - The paper reports on research data from the European Communication Monitor 2010, 2011 and 2012 (http://www.communicationmonitor.eu/) and draws on work already published in this area (Tench, Verhoeven and Zerfass, 2009; Verhoeven et al, 2012; and Zerfass et al, 2010, 2011) to illustrate the unruly unregulated Web 2.0 social media communication landscape in Europe. A range of literature is drawn on to provide the theoretical context for an exploration of issues that surround social media. Findings - In late modernity (Giddens, 1990) communication comes in many guises. Social media is one guise and it has re-shaped as well as transformed the nature of communications and the relationship between organisations and their stakeholders. Originality/value - Communicating CSR in the Wild West of social media requires diplomatic and political nous, as well as awareness and knowledge of the dangers and pitfalls of CSI. The data reported on in this paper illustrates well the above points and sets out scenarios for future development of corporate communication of CSR through, and with social media

ImageSpirit: Verbal Guided Image Parsing

Humans describe images in terms of nouns and adjectives while algorithms operate on images represented as sets of pixels. Bridging this gap between how humans would like to access images versus their typical representation is the goal of image parsing, which involves assigning object and attribute labels to pixel. In this paper we propose treating nouns as object labels and adjectives as visual attribute labels. This allows us to formulate the image parsing problem as one of jointly estimating per-pixel object and attribute labels from a set of training images. We propose an efficient (interactive time) solution. Using the extracted labels as handles, our system empowers a user to verbally refine the results. This enables hands-free parsing of an image into pixel-wise object/attribute labels that correspond to human semantics. Verbally selecting objects of interests enables a novel and natural interaction modality that can possibly be used to interact with new generation devices (e.g. smart phones, Google Glass, living room devices). We demonstrate our system on a large number of real-world images with varying complexity. To help understand the tradeoffs compared to traditional mouse based interactions, results are reported for both a large scale quantitative evaluation and a user study.Comment: http://mmcheng.net/imagespirit

A Report on the Chicago Region's Health and Human Services Sector

Looks at how major demographic shifts, policy changes, and funding trends are affecting the performance of individual agencies and Chicago's health and human services sector as a whole, and makes recommendations for improving the sector

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

A Qualitative Study on Co-designing a Domestic Robot with Senior People: Attitudinal Differences Among the Profiles of Boomers and the Silent Generation

L'integrazione dei robot domestici nella vita degli anziani riflette una possibile soluzione per fornire un'adeguata assistenza a una popolazione sempre più anziana. Tuttavia, non è ancora ben chiaro come gli anziani percepiscano i robot domestici e se siano effettivamente disposti ad adottarli nelle loro case. Questo articolo analizza gli atteggiamenti degli anziani nei confronti dei robot domestici, mostrando i risultati di uno studio qualitativo condotto durante un'esperienza di co-progettazione di un robot prototipo, su un campione sociologico di 30 ultrasessantacinquenni residenti a Genova, in Italia. I risultati mostrano come gli atteggiamenti nei confronti del robot differiscono a causa di caratteristiche individuali e strutturali, ma soprattutto per fattori generazionali e culturali, in particolare tra i baby boomer più giovani e gli intervistati più anziani. In conclusione, il nostro studio fornisce suggerimenti interessanti per progettisti e ingegneri per considerare le differenze generazionali come fattori predittivi di accettazione dei robot domestici da parte degli utenti senior.Integrating domestic robots into the lives of older adults reflects a possible solution to provide adequate caregiving to an increasingly ageing population. Still, it is unclear how older adults perceive domestic robots and whether they are willing to adopt them into their homes. This paper analyses the attitudes of older adults towards domestic robots by proving the results of a qualitative study conducted during an experience of co-designing a robotic prototype, addressing 30 community-dwelling over-65s who are residents in Genoa, Italy. Our results show how attitudes toward the robot differ both due to individual and structural characteristics, but especially owing to generational and cultural factors, particularly between younger-old Baby Boomers and older old respondents. In conclusion, our study provides interesting suggestions for designers and engineers to consider generational differences as predictive factors of acceptance of domestic robots by senior end-users