Multidimensional Capacitive Sensing for Robot-Assisted Dressing and Bathing

Robotic assistance presents an opportunity to benefit the lives of many people with physical disabilities, yet accurately sensing the human body and tracking human motion remain difficult for robots. We present a multidimensional capacitive sensing technique that estimates the local pose of a human limb in real time. A key benefit of this sensing method is that it can sense the limb through opaque materials, including fabrics and wet cloth. Our method uses a multielectrode capacitive sensor mounted to a robot's end effector. A neural network model estimates the position of the closest point on a person's limb and the orientation of the limb's central axis relative to the sensor's frame of reference. These pose estimates enable the robot to move its end effector with respect to the limb using feedback control. We demonstrate that a PR2 robot can use this approach with a custom six electrode capacitive sensor to assist with two activities of daily living-dressing and bathing. The robot pulled the sleeve of a hospital gown onto able-bodied participants' right arms, while tracking human motion. When assisting with bathing, the robot moved a soft wet washcloth to follow the contours of able-bodied participants' limbs, cleaning their surfaces. Overall, we found that multidimensional capacitive sensing presents a promising approach for robots to sense and track the human body during assistive tasks that require physical human-robot interaction.Comment: 8 pages, 16 figures, International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics 201

Assessment of personal care and medical robots from older adults' perspective

Demographic reports indicate that population of older adults is growing significantly over the world and in particular in developed nations. Consequently, there are a noticeable number of demands for certain services such as health-care systems and assistive medical robots and devices. In today's world, different types of robots play substantial roles specifically in medical sector to facilitate human life, especially older adults. Assistive medical robots and devices are created in various designs to fulfill specific needs of older adults. Though medical robots are utilized widely by senior citizens, it is dramatic to find out into what extent assistive robots satisfy their needs and expectations. This paper reviews various assessments of assistive medical robots from older adults' perspectives with the purpose of identifying senior citizen's needs, expectations, and preferences. On the other hand, these kinds of assessments inform robot designers, developers, and programmers to come up with robots fulfilling elderly's needs while improving their life quality

Assessment of personal care and medical robots from older adults' perspective

Demographic reports indicate that population of older adults is growing significantly over the world and in particular in developed nations. Consequently, there are a noticeable number of demands for certain services such as health-care systems and assistive medical robots and devices. In today's world, different types of robots play substantial roles specifically in medical sector to facilitate human life, especially older adults. Assistive medical robots and devices are created in various designs to fulfill specific needs of older adults. Though medical robots are utilized widely by senior citizens, it is dramatic to find out into what extent assistive robots satisfy their needs and expectations. This paper reviews various assessments of assistive medical robots from older adults' perspectives with the purpose of identifying senior citizen's needs, expectations, and preferences. On the other hand, these kinds of assessments inform robot designers, developers, and programmers to come up with robots fulfilling elderly's needs while improving their life quality

The Impact of COVID-19 on California's Plans for Caring for its Aging Population: Technology Adoption and Employment

Older adults have traditionally been the age cohort most resistant to the adoption of technology, making aging in place difficult and frequently expensive. But recent advances in technology - and those just on the horizon - have the potential to transform the ability to age in place by making senior healthcare both safer and more connected. Such technology can enable healthcare professionals to monitor their charges in real time, respond quickly to healthcare emergencies, make healthcare consultations safer and less onerous for both patients and healthcare workers, assist elders with physical therapy, connect older adults to family and friends, and provide entertainment and learning opportunities for seniors. It is now even possible for older adults in rural areas to receive remote surgery from world class surgeons. The arrival of COVID-19 forced older adults into isolation, severely limiting contact with healthcare providers, family and friends. But COVID-19 also accelerated the adoption of many of the trends already extant, incentivizing older adults and healthcare providers to adopt new technologies much more rapidly than ever before. The WelbeHealth Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) in California’s Central Valley, may provide a model of flexible, responsive and adaptive care

Inclusion of service robots in the daily lives of frail older users: a step-by-step definition procedure on users' requirements

The implications for the inclusion of robots in the daily lives of frail older adults, especially in relation to these population needs, have not been extensively studied. The “Multi-Role Shadow Robotic System for Independent Living” (SRS) project has developed a remotelycontrolled, semi-autonomous robotic system to be used in domestic environments. The objective of this paper is to document the iterative procedure used to identify, select and prioritize user requirements. Seventy-four requirements were identified by means of focus groups, individual interviews and scenario-based interviews. The list of user requirements, ordered according to impact, number and transnational criteria, revealed a high number of requirements related to basic and instrumental activities of daily living, cognitive and social support and monitorization, and also involving privacy, safety and adaptation issues. Analysing and understanding older users’ perceptions and needs when interacting with technological devices adds value to assistive technology and ensures that the systems address currently unmet needs

Multi-contact Planning on Humans for Physical Assistance by Humanoid

International audienceFor robots to interact with humans in close proximity safely and efficiently, a specialized method to compute whole-body robot posture and plan contact locations is required. In our work, a humanoid robot is used as a caregiver that is performing a physical assistance task. We propose a method for formulating and initializing a non-linear optimization posture generation problem from an intuitive description of the assistance task and the result of a human point cloud processing. The proposed method allows to plan whole-body posture and contact locations on a task-specific surface of a human body, under robot equilibrium, friction cone, torque/joint limits, collision avoidance, and assistance task inherent constraints. The proposed framework can uniformly handle any arbitrary surface generated from point clouds, for autonomously planing the contact locations and interaction forces on potentially moving, movable, and deformable surfaces, which occur in direct physical human-robot interaction. We conclude the paper with examples of posture generation for physical human-robot interaction scenarios

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

Can robots tackle late-life loneliness? : Scanning of future opportunities and challenges in assisted living facilities

This future-oriented study examines the opportunities and challenges offered by social robots and communication technology when aiming to decrease emotional and social loneliness in older people residing in assisted living (AL). The paper draws on prior literature on loneliness, elder care and social robots. The aim is to scan the futures regarding technology support for the frail older people in future AL. The analytical frame was built on Robert Weiss’ division of relational functions: attachment, social integration, opportunity for nurturance, reassurance of worth, sense of reliable alliance, and guidance in stressful situations, and on a distinction between direct and indirect social robots. Our examinations show that social robots could tackle both emotional and social loneliness in assisted living by empowering people to engage in different forms of social interaction inside and outside the facility. However, ethical concerns of objectification, lack of human contact, and deception need to be thoroughly considered when implementing social robots in care for frail older people.Peer reviewe