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

Autonomous Movement Control of Coaxial Mobile Robot based on Aspect Ratio of Human Face for Public Relation Activity Using Stereo Thermal Camera

In recent years, robots that recognize people around them and provide guidance, information, and monitoring have been attracting attention. The mainstream of conventional human recognition technology is the method using a camera or laser range finder. However, it is difficult to recognize with a camera due to fluctuations in lighting 1), and it is often affected by the recognition environment such as misrecognition 2) with a person's leg and a chair's leg with a laser range finder. Therefore, we propose a human recognition method using a thermal camera that can visualize human heat. This study aims to realize human-following autonomous movement based on human recognition. In addition, the distance from the robot to the person is measured with a stereo thermal camera that uses two thermal cameras. A coaxial two-wheeled robot that is compact and capable of super-credit turning is used as a mobile robot. Finally, we conduct an autonomous movement experiment of a coaxial mobile robot based on human recognition by combining these. We performed human-following experiments on a coaxial two-wheeled robot based on human recognition using a stereo thermal camera and confirmed that it moves appropriately to the location where the recognized person is in multiple use cases (scenarios). However, the accuracy of distance measurement by stereo vision is inferior to that of laser measurement. It is necessary to improve it in the case of movement that requires more accuracy

Uncovering perceived identification accuracy of in-vehicle biometric sensing

Biometric techniques can help make vehicles safer to drive, authenticate users, and provide personalized in-car experiences. However, it is unclear to what extent users are willing to trade their personal biometric data for such benefits. In this early work, we conducted an open card sorting study (N=11) to better understand how well users perceive their physical, behavioral and physiological features can personally identify them. Findings showed that on average participants clustere