Human-centred design methods : developing scenarios for robot assisted play informed by user panels and field trials

Original article can be found at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/ Copyright ElsevierThis article describes the user-centred development of play scenarios for robot assisted play, as part of the multidisciplinary IROMEC1 project that develops a novel robotic toy for children with special needs. The project investigates how robotic toys can become social mediators, encouraging children with special needs to discover a range of play styles, from solitary to collaborative play (with peers, carers/teachers, parents, etc.). This article explains the developmental process of constructing relevant play scenarios for children with different special needs. Results are presented from consultation with panel of experts (therapists, teachers, parents) who advised on the play needs for the various target user groups and who helped investigate how robotic toys could be used as a play tool to assist in the children’s development. Examples from experimental investigations are provided which have informed the development of scenarios throughout the design process. We conclude by pointing out the potential benefit of this work to a variety of research projects and applications involving human–robot interactions.Peer reviewe

Assistive robotics: research challenges and ethics education initiatives

Assistive robotics is a fast growing field aimed at helping healthcarers in hospitals, rehabilitation centers and nursery homes, as well as empowering people with reduced mobility at home, so that they can autonomously fulfill their daily living activities. The need to function in dynamic human-centered environments poses new research challenges: robotic assistants need to have friendly interfaces, be highly adaptable and customizable, very compliant and intrinsically safe to people, as well as able to handle deformable materials. Besides technical challenges, assistive robotics raises also ethical defies, which have led to the emergence of a new discipline: Roboethics. Several institutions are developing regulations and standards, and many ethics education initiatives include contents on human-robot interaction and human dignity in assistive situations. In this paper, the state of the art in assistive robotics is briefly reviewed, and educational materials from a university course on Ethics in Social Robotics and AI focusing on the assistive context are presented.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Future bathroom: A study of user-centred design principles affecting usability, safety and satisfaction in bathrooms for people living with disabilities

Research and development work relating to assistive technology 2010-11 (Department of Health) Presented to Parliament pursuant to Section 22 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 197

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

Robots for inclusive classrooms: a scoping review

Robot-based activities have been proven to be a valuable tool for children with learning and developmental disabilities. However, their feasibility in general educational environments needs further exploration. This scoping review provides a critical examination of robot-based learning experiences involving children with disabilities, implemented either in mainstream schools or in specialized centers in order to gain insight into their potential to support inclusion. For this purpose, a search was conducted in the multidisciplinary Scopus and WoS databases, completed with Dialnet database. Based on PRISMA guidelines for literature reviews, we limited the systematic analysis to 33 papers published after 2009 that contain information on the instructional design and details of how the activities were implemented. On the other hand, studies reporting interventions with robots for clinical purposes were excluded as well as papers focused exclusively on technical developments. Content analysis shows that most experiences lead to improvements in terms of educational goals and/or stakeholders’ satisfaction. However, the analysis also reported issues that may hinder the adoption of these practices in general classrooms and integrated education services. The reported difficulties include the lack of stability and autonomy of the robots used, the need for aids and adaptations to enable children with sensory and physical impairments to interact easily with the robots, and the requirement of technical support with system’s setup, implementation and maintenance. We conclude that robots and robotics are a powerful tool to address the needs of diverse learners who are included in mainstream classrooms. This review aims at presenting evidences of good practices and recommendations for successful implementation.Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. The authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Robot ZORA in rehabilitation and special education for children with severe physical disabilities: a pilot study

The aim of this study was to explore the potential of ZORA robot-based interventions in rehabilitation and special education for children with severe physical disabilities. A two-centre explorative pilot study was carried out over a 2.5-month period involving children with severe physical disabilities with a developmental age ranging from 2 to 8 years. Children participated in six sessions with the ZORA robot in individual or in group sessions. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to collect data on aspects of feasibility, usability, barriers and facilitators for the child as well as for the therapist and to obtain an indication of the effects on playfulness and the achievement of goals. In total, 17 children and seven professionals participated in the study. The results of this study show a positive contribution of ZORA in achieving therapy and educational goals. Moreover, sessions with ZORA were indicated as playful. Three main domains were indicated to be the most promising for the application of ZORA: movement skills, communication skills and cognitive skills. Furthermore, ZORA can contribute towards eliciting motivation, concentration, taking initiative and improving attention span of the children. On the basis of the results of the study, it can be concluded that ZORA has potential in therapy and education for children with severe physical disabilities. More research is needed to gain insight into how ZORA can be applied best in rehabilitation and special education.This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives License 4.0 (CCBY-NC-ND), where it is permissible to download and share the work provided it is properly cited. The work cannot be changed in any way or used commercially without permission from the journal. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Assistive Social Robots for People with Special needs

An increasing number of elderly people leads todemand for social robots to support health care and independentlife. An overview of various potential applications of social robotsis provided in this paper. In addition, the latest research progressin our institute is presented, i.e., multi-party interaction, gesturerecognition, affective computing, and attention capture. All theresearch and applications demonstrate that social robots are goodassistive robots for people with special needs

Robot skills and cognitive performance of preschool children

Several studies have demonstrated the potential of robots as assistive tools for play activities. Through the use of robots, children with motor impairments may be able to manipulate objects and engage in play activities as their typically developing peers, thus having the same opportunities to learn cognitive, social, motor and linguistic skills. Robot use can also provide a proxy measure of disabled children's cognitive abilities by comparing their performance with that of typically developing children. This paper reports a study with eighteen typically developing children aged three, four and five years to assess at which ages the cognitive concepts of causality, negation, binary logic, and sequencing are demonstrated during Lego robot use.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio