12,402 research outputs found
Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people
This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of
elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly
people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new
applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses
the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and
users for which service robots are and are not suitable
Supporting active and healthy aging with advanced robotics integrated in smart environment
The technological advances in the robotic and ICT fields represent an effective solution to address specific societal problems to support ageing and independent life. One of the key factors for these technologies is the integration of service robotics for optimising social services and improving quality of life of the elderly population. This chapter aims to underline the barriers of the state of the art, furthermore the authors present their concrete experiences to overcome these barriers gained at the RoboTown Living Lab of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna within past and current projects. They analyse and discuss the results in order to give recommendations based on their experiences. Furthermore, this work highlights the trend of development from stand-alone solutions to cloud computing architecture, describing the future research directions
A Low-Cost Tele-Presence Wheelchair System
This paper presents the architecture and implementation of a tele-presence
wheelchair system based on tele-presence robot, intelligent wheelchair, and
touch screen technologies. The tele-presence wheelchair system consists of a
commercial electric wheelchair, an add-on tele-presence interaction module, and
a touchable live video image based user interface (called TIUI). The
tele-presence interaction module is used to provide video-chatting for an
elderly or disabled person with the family members or caregivers, and also
captures the live video of an environment for tele-operation and
semi-autonomous navigation. The user interface developed in our lab allows an
operator to access the system anywhere and directly touch the live video image
of the wheelchair to push it as if he/she did it in the presence. This paper
also discusses the evaluation of the user experience
Understanding Circumstances for Desirable Proactive Behaviour of Voice Assistants: The Proactivity Dilemma
The next major evolutionary stage for voice assistants will be their capability to initiate interactions by themselves. However, to design proactive interactions, it is crucial to understand whether and when this behaviour is considered useful and how desirable it is perceived for different social contexts or ongoing activities. To investigate people's perspectives on proactivity and appropriate circumstances for it, we designed a set of storyboards depicting a variety of proactive actions in everyday situations and social settings and presented them to 15 participants in interactive interviews. Our findings suggest that, although many participants see benefits in agent proactivity, such as for urgent or critical issues, there are concerns about interference with social activities in multi-party settings, potential loss of agency, and intrusiveness. We discuss our implications for designing voice assistants with desirable proactive features
Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms
The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications
The Emerging Internet of Things Marketplace From an Industrial Perspective: A Survey
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a dynamic global information network
consisting of internet-connected objects, such as Radio-frequency
identification (RFIDs), sensors, actuators, as well as other instruments and
smart appliances that are becoming an integral component of the future
internet. Over the last decade, we have seen a large number of the IoT
solutions developed by start-ups, small and medium enterprises, large
corporations, academic research institutes (such as universities), and private
and public research organisations making their way into the market. In this
paper, we survey over one hundred IoT smart solutions in the marketplace and
examine them closely in order to identify the technologies used,
functionalities, and applications. More importantly, we identify the trends,
opportunities and open challenges in the industry-based the IoT solutions.
Based on the application domain, we classify and discuss these solutions under
five different categories: smart wearable, smart home, smart, city, smart
environment, and smart enterprise. This survey is intended to serve as a
guideline and conceptual framework for future research in the IoT and to
motivate and inspire further developments. It also provides a systematic
exploration of existing research and suggests a number of potentially
significant research directions.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing 201
Inventory of ATT system requirements for elderly and disabled drivers and travellers
This Inventory of ATT System Requirements for Elderly and Disabled Drivers and
Travellers is the product of the TELSCAN project’s Workpackage 3: Identification and
Updating of User Requirements of Elderly and Disabled Travellers. It describes the
methods and tools used to identify the needs of elderly and disabled (E&D) travellers.
The result of this investigation is a summary of the requirements of elderly and disabled
travellers using different modes of transport, including private cars, buses/trams,
metros/trains, ships and airplanes. It provides a generic user requirements specification
which can guide the design of all transport telematics systems. However, it is important
to stress that projects should also capture a more detailed definition of user
requirements for their specific application area or system
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