1,689 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
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
Healthcare Robotics
Robots have the potential to be a game changer in healthcare: improving
health and well-being, filling care gaps, supporting care givers, and aiding
health care workers. However, before robots are able to be widely deployed, it
is crucial that both the research and industrial communities work together to
establish a strong evidence-base for healthcare robotics, and surmount likely
adoption barriers. This article presents a broad contextualization of robots in
healthcare by identifying key stakeholders, care settings, and tasks; reviewing
recent advances in healthcare robotics; and outlining major challenges and
opportunities to their adoption.Comment: 8 pages, Communications of the ACM, 201
Towards Assistive Feeding with a General-Purpose Mobile Manipulator
General-purpose mobile manipulators have the potential to serve as a
versatile form of assistive technology. However, their complexity creates
challenges, including the risk of being too difficult to use. We present a
proof-of-concept robotic system for assistive feeding that consists of a Willow
Garage PR2, a high-level web-based interface, and specialized autonomous
behaviors for scooping and feeding yogurt. As a step towards use by people with
disabilities, we evaluated our system with 5 able-bodied participants. All 5
successfully ate yogurt using the system and reported high rates of success for
the system's autonomous behaviors. Also, Henry Evans, a person with severe
quadriplegia, operated the system remotely to feed an able-bodied person. In
general, people who operated the system reported that it was easy to use,
including Henry. The feeding system also incorporates corrective actions
designed to be triggered either autonomously or by the user. In an offline
evaluation using data collected with the feeding system, a new version of our
multimodal anomaly detection system outperformed prior versions.Comment: This short 4-page paper was accepted and presented as a poster on
May. 16, 2016 in ICRA 2016 workshop on 'Human-Robot Interfaces for Enhanced
Physical Interactions' organized by Arash Ajoudani, Barkan Ugurlu, Panagiotis
Artemiadis, Jun Morimoto. It was peer reviewed by one reviewe
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