Designing intelligent games adapting to children’s playing maturity

Play is a voluntary activity in which individuals involve for pleasure. It is very important for children because through playing they learn to explore, develop and master physical and social skills. Play development is part of the child’s growth and maturation process since birth. As such, it is widely used in the context of Occupational Therapy (OT). Occupational therapists use activity analysis to shape play activities for therapeutic use and promote an environment where the child can approach various activities while playing. This paper builds on knowledge stemming from the processes and theories used in OT and activity analysis to present the design, implementation and deployment of a new version of the popular farm game as deployed within an Ambient Intelligence (AmI) simulation space. Within this space, an augmented interactive table and a three-dimensional avatar are employed to extend the purpose and objectives of the game, thus also expanding its applicability to the age group of preschool children from 3 to 6 years old. More importantly, through the environment, the game monitors and follows the progress of each young player, adapts accordingly and provides important information regarding the abilities and skills of the child and their development over time. The developed game was evaluated through a small scale study with children of the aforementioned age groups, their parents, and child care professionals. The outcomes of the evaluation were positive for all target groups and provided significant evidence regarding its potential to offer novel play experience to children, but also act as a valuable tool to child care professionals

Monitoring Health Parameters of Elders to Support Independent Living and Improve Their Quality of Life

Improving the well-being and quality of life of the elderly population is closely related to assisting them to effectively manage age-related conditions such as chronic illnesses and anxiety, and to maintain their independence and self-sufficiency as much as possible. This paper presents the design, architecture and implementation structure of an adaptive system for monitoring the health and well-being of the elderly. The system was designed following best practices of the Human-Centred Design approach involving representative end-users from the early stages

Hobbit: Providing Fall Detection and Prevention for the Elderly in the Real World

We present the robot developed within the Hobbit project, a socially assistive service robot aiming at the challenge of enabling prolonged independent living of elderly people in their own homes. We present the second prototype (Hobbit PT2) in terms of hardware and functionality improvements following first user studies. Our main contribution lies within the description of all components developed within the Hobbit project, leading to autonomous operation of 371 days during field trials in Austria, Greece, and Sweden. In these field trials, we studied how 18 elderly users (aged 75 years and older) lived with the autonomously interacting service robot over multiple weeks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a multifunctional, low-cost service robot equipped with a manipulator was studied and evaluated for several weeks under real-world conditions. We show that Hobbit’s adaptive approach towards the user increasingly eased the interaction between the users and Hobbit. We provide lessons learned regarding the need for adaptive behavior coordination, support during emergency situations, and clear communication of robotic actions and their consequences for fellow researchers who are developing an autonomous, low-cost service robot designed to interact with their users in domestic contexts. Our trials show the necessity to move out into actual user homes, as only there can we encounter issues such as misinterpretation of actions during unscripted human-robot interaction