Encoding guidelines for a culturally competent robot for elderly care

The functionalities and behaviours of socially assistive robots for the care of older people are usually defined by the robot’s designers with limited room for runtime adaptation to meet the preferences, expectations and needs of the assisted person. However, adaptation plays a crucial role for the robot’s acceptability and ultimately for its effectiveness. Culture, which deeply influences a person’s preferences and habits, can be viewed as an invaluable “enabling technology” to achieve such level of adaptation. This paper discusses how guidelines describing culturally competent assistive behaviours can be encoded in a robot to effectively tune its actions, gestures and words. The proposed system is implemented on a Pepper robot and tested with an Indian persona, whose habits and preferences the robot discovers and adapts to at runtime

Encoding guidelines for a culturally competent robot for elderly care

The functionalities and behaviours of socially assistive robots for the care of older people are usually defined by the robot’s designers with limited room for runtime adaptation to meet the preferences, expectations and needs of the assisted person. However, adaptation plays a crucial role for the robot’s acceptability and ultimately for its effectiveness. Culture, which deeply influences a person’s preferences and habits, can be viewed as an invaluable “enabling technology” to achieve such level of adaptation. This paper discusses how guidelines describing culturally competent assistive behaviours can be encoded in a robot to effectively tune its actions, gestures and words. The proposed system is implemented on a Pepper robot and tested with an Indian persona, whose habits and preferences the robot discovers and adapts to at runtime

Paving the way for culturally competent robots: a position paper

Cultural competence is a well known requirement for an effective healthcare, widely investigated in the nursing literature. We claim that personal assistive robots should likewise be culturally competent, aware of general cultural characteristics and of the different forms they take indifferent individuals, and sensitive to cultural differences while perceiving, reasoning, and acting. Drawing inspiration from existing guidelines for culturally competent healthcare and the state-of-the-art in culturally competent robotics, we identify the key robot capabilities which enable culturally competent behaviours and discuss methodologies for their development and evaluation

Knowledge representation for culturally competent personal robots: requirements, design principles, implementation, and assessment

Culture, intended as the set of beliefs, values, ideas, language, norms and customs which compose a person’s life, is an essential element to know by any robot for personal assistance. Culture, intended as that person’s background, can be an invaluable source of information to drive and speed up the process of discovering and adapting to the person’s habits, preferences and needs. This article discusses the requirements posed by cultural competence on the knowledge management system of a robot. We propose a framework for cultural knowledge representation that relies on (i) a three layer ontology for storing concepts of relevance, culture specific information and statistics, person-specific information and preferences; (ii) an algorithm for the acquisition of person-specific knowledge, which uses culture specific knowledge to drive the search; (iii) a Bayesian Network for speeding up the adaptation to the person by propagating the effects of acquiring one specific information onto interconnected concepts. We have conducted a preliminary evaluation of the framework involving 159 Italian and German volunteers and considering 122 among habits, attitudes and social norms

Knowledge representation for culturally competent personal robots: requirements, design principles, implementation, and assessment

Culture, intended as the set of beliefs, values, ideas, language, norms and customs which compose a person’s life, is an essential element to know by any robot for personal assistance. Culture, intended as that person’s background, can be an invaluable source of information to drive and speed up the process of discovering and adapting to the person’s habits, preferences and needs. This article discusses the requirements posed by cultural competence on the knowledge management system of a robot. We propose a framework for cultural knowledge representation that relies on (i) a three layer ontology for storing concepts of relevance, culture specific information and statistics, person-specific information and preferences; (ii) an algorithm for the acquisition of person-specific knowledge, which uses culture specific knowledge to drive the search; (iii) a Bayesian Network for speeding up the adaptation to the person by propagating the effects of acquiring one specific information onto interconnected concepts. We have conducted a preliminary evaluation of the framework involving 159 Italian and German volunteers and considering 122 among habits, attitudes and social norms

Designing an Experimental and a Reference Robot to Test and Evaluate the Impact of Cultural Competence in Socially Assistive Robotics

The article focusses on the work performed in preparation for an experimental trial aimed at evaluating the impact of a culturally competent robot for care home assistance. Indeed, it has been estabilished that the user's cultural identity plays an important role during the interaction with a robotic system and cultural competence may be one of the key elements for increasing capabilities of socially assistive robots. Specifically, the paper describes part of the work carried out for the definition and implementation of two different robotic systems for the care of older adults: a culturally competent robot, that shows its awareness of the user's cultural identity, and a reference robot, non culturally competent, but with the same functionalities of the former. The design of both robots is here described in detail, together with the key elements that make a socially assistive robot culturally competent, which should be absent in the non-culturally competent counterpart. Examples of the experimental phase of the CARESSES project, with a fictional user are reported, giving a hint of the validness of the proposed approach

Culture as a Sensor? A Novel Perspective on Human Activity Recognition

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems are devoted to identifying, amidst the sensory stream provided by one or more sensors located so that they can monitor the actions of a person, portions related to the execution of a number of a-priori defined activities of interest. Improving the performance of systems for Human Activity Recognition is a long-standing research goal: solutions include more accurate sensors, more sophisticated algorithms for the extraction and analysis of relevant information from the sensory data, and the enhancement of the sensory analysis with general or person-specific knowledge about the execution of the activities of interest. Following the latter trend, in this article we propose the association and enhancement of the sensory data analysis with cultural information, that can be seen as an estimate of person-specific information, relieved of the burden of a long/complex setup phase. We propose a culture-aware Human Activity Recognition system which associates the recognition response provided by a state-of-the-art, culture-unaware HAR system with culture-specific information about where and when activities are most likely performed in different cultures, encoded in an ontology. The merging of the cultural information with the culture-unaware responses is done by a Bayesian Network, whose probabilistic approach allows for avoiding stereotypical representations. Experiments performed offline and online, using images acquired by a mobile robot in an apartment, show that the culture-aware HAR system consistently outperforms the culture-unaware HAR system

A review and comparison of ontology-based approaches to robot autonomy

Within the next decades, robots will need to be able to execute a large variety of tasks autonomously in a large variety of environments. To relax the resulting programming effort, a knowledge-enabled approach to robot programming can be adopted to organize information in re-usable knowledge pieces. However, for the ease of reuse, there needs to be an agreement on the meaning of terms. A common approach is to represent these terms using ontology languages that conceptualize the respective domain. In this work, we will review projects that use ontologies to support robot autonomy. We will systematically search for projects that fulfill a set of inclusion criteria and compare them with each other with respect to the scope of their ontology, what types of cognitive capabilities are supported by the use of ontologies, and which is their application domain.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Intelligent technologies for the aging brain: opportunities and challenges

Intelligent computing is rapidly reshaping healthcare. In light of the global burden of population aging and neurological disorders, dementia and elderly care are among the healthcare sectors that are most likely to benefit from this technological revolution. Trends in artificial intelligence, robotics, ubiquitous computing, neurotechnology and other branches of biomedical engineering are progressively enabling novel opportunities for technology-enhanced care. These Intelligent Assistive Technologies (IATs) open the prospects of supporting older adults with neurocognitive disabilities, maintain their independence, reduce the burden on caregivers and delay the need for long-term care (1, 2). While technology develops fast, yet little knowledge is available to patients and health professionals about the current availability, applicability, and capability of existing IATs. This thesis proposes a state-of-the-art analysis of IATs in dementia and elderly care. Our findings indicate that advances in intelligent technology are resulting in a rapidly expanding number and variety of assistive solutions for older adults and people with neurocognitive disabilities. However, our analysis identifies a number of challenges that negatively affect the optimal deployment and uptake of IATs among target users and care institutions. These include design issues, sub-optimal approaches to product development, translational barriers between lab and clinics, lack of adequate validation and implementation, as well as data security and cyber-risk weaknesses. Additionally, in virtue of their technological novelty, intelligent technologies raise a number of Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI). Therefore, a significant portion of this thesis is devoted to providing an early ethical Technology Assessment (eTA) of intelligent technology, hence contributing to preparing the terrain for its safe and ethically responsible adoption. This assessment is primarily focused on intelligent technologies at the human-machine interface, as these applications enable an unprecedented exposure of the intimate dimension of individuals to the digital infosphere. Issues of privacy, integrity, equality, and dual-use were addressed at the level of stakeholder analysis, normative ethics and human-rights law. Finally, this thesis is aimed at providing evidence-based recommendations for guiding participatory and responsible development in intelligent technology, and delineating governance strategies that maximize the clinical benefits of IATs for the aging world, while minimizing unintended risks