Social Robots in the Home: What Factors Influence Attitudes Towards their Use in Assistive Care?

Advances in technology and science have led to the application of artificial intelligence in many different areas of life. In particular, they have led to the appearance of robots in the domestic sphere. One type of robot – namely, the social robot – has been endowed with a very human aesthetic and is designed to interact with humans, and it is increasingly being used to perform “human tasks”. Social robots have also been introduced into the social services, providing companionship and assistive services for children, the infirm and the elderly. Such usage has rightly attracted the interest of the social sciences, fuelling the debate about the acceptance of social robots by their end-users. In this paper, regression analysis is applied to data from the Eurobarometer survey to investigate how socio-demographic features and self-confidence on technological development influence European citizens’ attitudes towards robots in the social services. The results show that men, with a high level of education, living in a big city and with experience of robot use have more positive attitudes towards the concept of robots for assistive services. This study emphasizes the need to consider the relation between attitudes towards social robots and their use to avoid the generation of social inequalities

How a Diverse Research Ecosystem Has Generated New Rehabilitation Technologies: Review of NIDILRR’s Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers

Over 50 million United States citizens (1 in 6 people in the US) have a developmental, acquired, or degenerative disability. The average US citizen can expect to live 20% of his or her life with a disability. Rehabilitation technologies play a major role in improving the quality of life for people with a disability, yet widespread and highly challenging needs remain. Within the US, a major effort aimed at the creation and evaluation of rehabilitation technology has been the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers (RERCs) sponsored by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. As envisioned at their conception by a panel of the National Academy of Science in 1970, these centers were intended to take a “total approach to rehabilitation”, combining medicine, engineering, and related science, to improve the quality of life of individuals with a disability. Here, we review the scope, achievements, and ongoing projects of an unbiased sample of 19 currently active or recently terminated RERCs. Specifically, for each center, we briefly explain the needs it targets, summarize key historical advances, identify emerging innovations, and consider future directions. Our assessment from this review is that the RERC program indeed involves a multidisciplinary approach, with 36 professional fields involved, although 70% of research and development staff are in engineering fields, 23% in clinical fields, and only 7% in basic science fields; significantly, 11% of the professional staff have a disability related to their research. We observe that the RERC program has substantially diversified the scope of its work since the 1970’s, addressing more types of disabilities using more technologies, and, in particular, often now focusing on information technologies. RERC work also now often views users as integrated into an interdependent society through technologies that both people with and without disabilities co-use (such as the internet, wireless communication, and architecture). In addition, RERC research has evolved to view users as able at improving outcomes through learning, exercise, and plasticity (rather than being static), which can be optimally timed. We provide examples of rehabilitation technology innovation produced by the RERCs that illustrate this increasingly diversifying scope and evolving perspective. We conclude by discussing growth opportunities and possible future directions of the RERC program

Integrating Human Inputs with Autonomous Behaviors on an Intelligent Wheelchair Platform

Researchers have developed and assessed a computer-controlled wheelchair called the Smart Chair. A shared control framework has different levels of autonomy, allowing the human operator complete control of the chair at each level while ensuring the user\u27s safety. The semiautonomous system incorporates deliberative motion plans or controllers, reactive behaviors, and human user inputs. At every instant in time, control inputs from three sources are integrated continuously to provide a safe trajectory to the destination. Experiments with 50 participants demonstrate quantitatively and qualitatively the benefits of human-robot augmentation in three modes of operation: manual, autonomous, and semiautonomous. This article is part of a special issue on Interacting with Autonomy