Talking About Task Progress: Towards Integrating Task Planning and Dialog for Assistive Robotic Services

The use of service robots to assist ageing people in their own homes has the potential to allow people to maintain their independence, increasing their health and quality of life. In many assistive applications, robots perform tasks on people’s behalf that they are unable or unwilling to monitor directly. It is important that users be given useful and appropriate information about task progress. People being assisted in homes and other realworld environments are likely be engaged in other activities while they wait for a service, so information should also be presented in an appropriate, nonintrusive manner. This paper presents a human-robot interaction experiment investigatingwhat type of feedback people prefer in verbal updates by a service robot about distributed assistive services. People found feedback about time until task completion more useful than feedback about events in task progress or no feedback. We also discuss future research directions that involve giving non-expert users more input into the task planning process when delays or failures occur that necessitate replanning or modifying goals

Pro-active Meeting Assistants : Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

How Diverse is Entrepreneurship? Observations on the social heterogeneity of self-employment in Germany

The discussion on entrepreneurship often treats entrepreneurs as agents of ideas of economic change and growth. Entrepreneurs are considered to serve as potential multipliers delivering individual and social wealth and prosperity. In that context entrepreneurship has been treated as a rather homogenous category, internal differences were not in the focus of academic talk. In public policy discourse entrepreneurship and the labour market category of self-employment are often used interchangeably. Images and interpretation of self-employment are mostly based on comparison of self-employment with other categories of wage or salary dependent labour market groups. This way self-employed people prove to become an averaged one-type figure. The proposed paper wants to highlight the other side of economic and social reality: the heterogeneity of self-employment. Referring to empirical data for the case of Germany the argumentation intends to illuminate different levels of social and economic integration of self-employed people. Working parameters and firm sizes, economic sectors of activity, income patterns, working hours and biographies have diversified and became increasingly heterogeneous so that further discussion is ultimately provoked: Which entrepreneurship are we talking about when talking entrepreneurship? Where are links between different fractions of the category of self-employment compared to each other and to other socio-economic groups? The contribution must be regarded as a theoretical and empirical task to connect entrepreneurship with debate on innovation, culture and finance.self-employment; heterogeneity; entrepreneurship

Pro-active Meeting Assistants: Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all. This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

Robotic Rabbit Companions: amusing or a nuisance?

Most of the studies in human-robot interaction involve controlled experiments in a laboratory and only a limited number of studies have put robotic companions into people’s home. Introducing robots into a real-life environment does not only pose many technical challenges but also raises several methodological issues. And even though there might be a gain in ecological validity of the findings, there are other drawbacks that limit the validity of the results. In this paper we reflect on some of these issues based on the experience we gained in the SERA project where a robotic companion was put in the homes of a few people for ten days. We try to draw some general lessons from this experience

Inter-organization cooperation for ambient assisted living

In the last years we have witnessed to a substantial increase on the number of people in need of care services, espe-cially among the elderly, a phenomenon related to population ageing. However, this is becoming not exclusive of the elderly, as diseases like obesity, diabetes, and blood pressure have been increasing amongst young adults. This is a new reality which needs to be dealt by the healthcare sector, specifically the public one. Given these new scenarios, the importance of finding new and cost-effective ways for health care delivery are of particular relevance, especially when it is believed that these new patients should not be removed from their natural, day-to-day life, environment. The evolution of the, so called, new technolo-gies may pay here a very important role as they may become part of the solution for this new problematic. Actually, they are already been used as, in recent years, several projects have raised in this relatively new area of work. These projects, although legitimate ones, were essential for delineating a path to pursue for others to come, as they were in some case, very simple ones (e.g. panic buttons), and, especially, reactive ones. In this paper, we are going to present how we are trying to evolve these projects a step further, through the introduction of proactiveness as a key factor, taking advantage of “new”, as in applied to this areas, techniques of decision making, idea generation, argumentation and data quality, applied, not only to the in transit information, but also to the one provided by the several intervenient as well as themselves. In order to be able to pursue this delineated path, a new approach for knowledge representation, reasoning, and even for problem solving is proposed. To achieve these goals, the VirtualECare environment is presented, together with its sustaining infrastructure and architecture. Particular attention will be paidto how it may be used to simulate a virtual Assisted Living Environment in order to, later, bet-ter monitor real ones, attending to its customers’ needs

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

Better Health and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) from a global, regional and local economic perspective

Assisting technologies aim to provide more support in the meeting of one's daily needs and the preservation of one's autonomy and quality of life. Continual developments in medicine, medical equipment, nursing and medical care are assumed to lead to new types of care being created. A high degree of social and economic relevance has been attributed to assisting technologies, as well as information and communication systems, by scientists and politicians alike, particularly in connection with the development, promotion and organization of so-called senior-friendly environments and with ambient assisted living (AAL).economic development; ambient assisted living; health care system; assisting technologies; health care; new technologies; health economy

Better health and ambient assisted living (AAL) from a global, regional and local economic perspective

Assisting technologies aim to provide more support in the meeting of one's daily needs and the preservation of one's autonomy and quality of life. Continual developments in medicine, medical equipment, nursing and medical care are assumed to lead to new types of care being created. A high degree of social and economic relevance has been attributed to assisting technologies, as well as information and communication systems, by scientists and politicians alike, particularly in connection with the development, promotion and organization of so-called senior-friendly environments and with ambient assisted living (AAL). Here the focus is especially upon the aged of the future, their specific demands and resources, which these technologies should be able to serve while adhering to their individual requirements. These new technologies can also be extremely relevant to people surrounding the elderly. They can make a considerable difference to the way in which people are able to live together for example by assisting the nursing care provided by close relatives and they may represent new opportunities to the providers of outpatient and inpatient nursing and medical care. -- Assistierende Technologien sollen der besseren Unterstützung bei der Deckung von Bedürfnissen des täglichen Lebens und zur Erhaltung von Selbständigkeit und Lebensqualität dienen. Es ist davon auszugehen, dass durch die kontinuierliche Entwicklung in der Medizin, der Medizintechnik sowie assistierender Technologien in der medizinischen und pflegerischen Versorgung neue Versorgungsmöglichkeiten geschaffen werden. Insbesondere im Zusammenhang mit der Entwicklung, der Förderung und der Ausgestaltung sogenannter altersgerechter Lebenswelten bzw. eines ambient assisted living (AAL) wird den unterstützenden Technologien und Informations- und Kommunikationstechniken von wissenschaftlicher und politischer Seite eine hohe gesellschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Relevanz zugewiesen. Im Fokus stehen dabei vor allem die zukünftigen Älteren und ihre spezifischen Bedarfe und Ressourcen, die diese Technologien ihren individuellen Bedürfnissen entsprechend nutzen können sollen. Derartige Techniken können aber auch für Personen aus dem sozialen Umfeld der Älteren von hoher Relevanz sein. So können diese die Gestaltung des Zusammenlebens erheblich ändern - beispielsweise durch die Unterstützung bei der pflegerischen Versorgung durch Angehörige - und beispielsweise den Anbietern im Bereich der gesundheitlichen und pflegerischen ambulanten und stationären Versorgung neue Möglichkeiten der Versorgung bieten.

2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic: Built Environment Considerations To Reduce Transmission.

With the rapid spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that results in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), corporate entities, federal, state, county, and city governments, universities, school districts, places of worship, prisons, health care facilities, assisted living organizations, daycares, homeowners, and other building owners and occupants have an opportunity to reduce the potential for transmission through built environment (BE)-mediated pathways. Over the last decade, substantial research into the presence, abundance, diversity, function, and transmission of microbes in the BE has taken place and revealed common pathogen exchange pathways and mechanisms. In this paper, we synthesize this microbiology of the BE research and the known information about SARS-CoV-2 to provide actionable and achievable guidance to BE decision makers, building operators, and all indoor occupants attempting to minimize infectious disease transmission through environmentally mediated pathways. We believe this information is useful to corporate and public administrators and individuals responsible for building operations and environmental services in their decision-making process about the degree and duration of social-distancing measures during viral epidemics and pandemics