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

Robot pain: a speculative review of its functions

Given the scarce bibliography dealing explicitly with robot pain, this chapter has enriched its review with related research works about robot behaviours and capacities in which pain could play a role. It is shown that all such roles ¿ranging from punishment to intrinsic motivation and planning knowledge¿ can be formulated within the unified framework of reinforcement learning.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The ACS LCID Project: overview and first results

The star formation history (SFH) of Local Group galaxies is a powerful tool for studying their evolution, including chemical enrichment histories and stellar population gradients, which in turn may shed light on the role of reionization or Supernovae feedback in galaxy formation and evolution. In particular, isolated dwarfs are ideal laboratories since their evolution has not been complicated by the vicinity of giant galaxies. In this paper, we present the project Local Cosmology from Isolated Dwarfs (LCID), aimed at deriving detailed SFHs for a sample of Local Group isolated dwarf galaxies. To accomplish this goal we have collected, using the ACS on board the HST, color-magnitude diagrams (CMD) reaching their oldest main sequence turnoff (V~28 or M_V~+3.5) with good photometric accuracy. Some preliminary results from the CMDs are shown and briefly discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. To appear in the Proceedings of IAU Symposium 241: "Stellar Populations as Building Blocks of Galaxies", 10-16 December, 2006 at La Palma, Canary Islands, Spai

Willingness to Pay for Community Health Fund Card in Mtwara Rural District,Tanzania

\ud The Ministry of Health in Tanzania has established a new programme in the primary health care service. CHF is a district-level prepayment scheme targeted at the rural population.CHF starts in 1995 on a pilot basis in one district and in 2003 has to be implemented in all districts. Mtwara Rural District is in the implantation stage. This study was proposed for assisting the district in pricing the health service and developing recommendations for the process of CHF implementation. It is focused primarily on the willingness of the population to pay for a CHF card.Price is not the only factor related to willingness to join the CHF. Complex human behavior,choices and motivation can also determine it. The result of the survey have drawn up the demand curve and constructed the chart of expected revenues from CHF card. Next stage was estimating the health Facility costs in order to find out the amount of funds to be collected. The CHF card rates proposed are based in maximizing the population under the health care system and covering the HF costs. The questionnaire prepared for the survey includes a section to know the opinion of respondents about the quality of care provided by MoH health facilities. According to the data obtained, the study proposed to establish the Tanzania national drug programme(Indent System),before CHF. Indent System changes the drug supply system and might improve the health quality. Experiences in Africa countries are also reviewed. This section contents the constraints identifies in other studies about different systems of payment. Evidence demonstrates the dangers associated with charging clients at the point of use of health service. Almost invariably payment systems have the affect of dissuading the poor from ccessing this services. Exemption mechanisms attempting to mitigate this impact have not tended to work. The experiences suggests querying some issues about CHF. The study is addressed to two audiences , MRD and MSF. This factor made complex drawing up the document. It was prepared with a view to: Pricing the health care services ,Developing recommendations for the CHF implementation in MRD and Providing qualitative information about the side effects of payment systems in the health care sector.\u