Human-Machine Interfaces for Service Robotics

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Outcomes of COVID-19 patients treated with continuous positive airway pressure outside ICU

Aim We aim at characterizing a large population of Coronavirus 19 (COVID-19) patients with moderate-to-severe hypoxemic acute respiratory failure (ARF) receiving CPAP outside intensive care unit (ICU), and ascertaining whether the duration of CPAP application increased the risk of mortality for patients requiring intubation. Methods In this retrospective, multicentre cohort study, we included COVID-19 adult patients, treated with CPAP outside ICU for hypoxemic ARF from March 1 st to April 15th, 2020. We collected demographic and clinical data, including CPAP therapeutic goal, hospital length of stay (LOS), and 60- day in-hospital mortality. Results The study includes 537 patients with a median age of 69 (IQR, 60-76) years. Males were 391 (73%). According to predefined CPAP therapeutic goal, 397 (74%) patients were included in full treatment subgroup, and 140 (26%) in the do-not intubate (DNI) subgroup. Median CPAP duration was 4 (IQR, 1-8) days, while hospital LOS 16 (IQR, 9-27) days. Sixty-day in-hospital mortality was overall 34% (95%CI, 0.304-0.384), and 21% (95%CI, 0.169-0.249) and 73% (95%CI, 0.648-0.787) for full treatment and DNI subgroups, respectively. In the full treatment subgroup, in-hospital mortality was 42% (95%CI, 0.345-0.488) for 180 (45%) CPAP failures requiring intubation, while 2% (95%CI, 0.008- 0.035) for the remaining 217 (55%) patients who succeeded. Delaying intubation was associated with increased mortality [HR, 1.093 (95%CI, 1.010-1.184)]. Conclusions We described a large population of COVID-19 patients treated with CPAP outside ICU. Intubation delay represents a risk factor for mortality. Further investigation is needed for early identification of CPAP failures

Human-Robot Interfaces for Interactive Receptionist Systems and Wayfinding Applications

Service robots are playing an increasingly relevant role in society. Humanoid robots, especially those equipped with social skills, could be used to address a number of people’s daily needs. Knowing how these robots are perceived and potentially accepted by ordinary users when used in common tasks and what the benefits brought are in terms, e.g., of tasks’ effectiveness, is becoming of primary importance. This paper specifically focuses on receptionist scenarios, which can be regarded as a good benchmark for social robotics applications given their implications on human-robot interaction. Precisely, the goal of this paper is to investigate how robots used as direction-giving systems can be perceived by human users and can impact on their wayfinding performance. A comparative analysis is performed, considering both solutions from the literature and new implementations which use different types of interfaces to ask for and give directions (voice, in-the-air arm pointing gestures, route tracing) and various embodiments (physical robot, virtual agent, interactive audio-map). Experimental results showed a marked preference for a physical robot-based system showing directions on a map over solutions using gestures, as well as a positive effect of embodiment and social behaviors. Moreover, in the comparison, physical robots were generally preferred to virtual agents

Developing touch-less interfaces to interact with 3D contents in public exhibitions

Interacting with 3D contents is a challenging task and the implementation of natural and effective interfaces is usually demanded to computer programmers. On the other hand, exhibit designers would greatly take advantage of graphic tools able to completely hide technical details and code programming. This paper presents a graphic editor where interface designers can intuitively link objects, gestures and actions together, without needing computer science skills. Tests show the advantages of the proposed solution both for experts and beginners; moreover, a real example concerning the exhibit of the digital Nefertiti's bust within a holographic case controlled by hand gestures has been implemented

Comparing usability of user interfaces for robotic telepresence

In the last years, robotic telepresence solutions have received a significant attention from both the commercial and academic worlds, due to their ability to allow people to feel physically present at a remote place and move in it. Operating a mobile robot with some autonomous capabilities from distance can enable a wide range of mass-market applications, encompassing teleconferencing, virtual tourism, etc. In these scenarios, the possibility to interact with the robot in a natural way becomes of crucial importance. The aim of this paper is to investigate, through a comparative analysis, the usability of two major approaches used today for controlling telepresence robots, i.e., keyboard and point-and-click video navigation. A control system featuring the above interfaces plus a combination of the two has been developed, and applied to the operation of a prototype telepresence robot in an office scenario. The system additionally includes functionalities found in many research and industry solutions, like map-based localization and “augmented” navigation. Then, a user study has been performed to assess the usability of the various control modalities for the execution of some navigation tasks in the considered context. The study provided precious indications to be possibly exploited for guiding next developments in the field

Adjustable autonomy for UAV supervision applications through mental workload assessment techniques

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles have received a significant attention in the research community, due to their adaptability in different applications, such as surveillance, disaster response, traffic monitoring, transportation of goods, first aid, etc. Nowadays, even though UAVs can be equipped with some autonomous capabilities, they often operate in high uncertainty environments in which supervisory systems including human in the control loop are still required. Systems envisaging decision-making capabilities and equipped with flexible levels of autonomy are needed to support UAVs controllers in monitoring operations. The aim of this paper is to build an adjustable autonomy system able to assist UAVs controllers by predicting mental workload changes when the number of UAVs to be monitored highly increases. The proposed system adjusts its level of autonomy by discriminating situations in which operators' abilities are sufficient to perform UAV supervision tasks from situations in which system suggestions or interventions may be required. Then, a user study was performed to create a mental-workload prediction model based on operators' cognitive demand in drone monitoring operations. The model is exploited to train the system developed to infer the appropriate level of autonomy accordingly. The study provided precious indications to be possibly exploited for guiding next developments of the adjustable autonomy system proposed

RobotQuest: A robotic game based on projected mixed reality and proximity interaction

The appearance of video games in modern society introduced a number of modifications in the recreational and socialization habits of both youths and adults. In particular, various studies have associated the excessive use of this media with health and social problems, being the “classical” video game often a sedentary and solitary activity. The purpose of this work is to propose a possible way to deal with the above issues, which consists in exploiting a platform for robotic gaming based on consumer hardware that is being developed with the aim to reintroduce the physical and social dimensions in digital games. The proposed solution encompasses a floor-projected Mixed Reality (MR) environment, an autonomous toy robot and a set of tangible interfaces created using proximity beacons, which are combined in a robotic game concept named RobotQuest that is meant to show how to favor an engaging room-scale interaction between players and real/virtual game elements

Immersive virtual reality-based simulation to support the design of natural human-robot Interfaces for service robotic applications

The increasing popularity of robotics and related applications in modern society makes interacting and communicating with robots of crucial importance. In service robotics, where robots operate to assist human beings in their daily life, natural interaction paradigms capable to foster an ever more intuitive and effective collaboration between involved actors are needed. The aim of this paper is to discuss activities that have been carried out to create a 3D immersive simulation environment able to ease the design and evaluation of natural human-robot interfaces in generic usage contexts. The proposed framework has been exploited to tackle a specific use case represented by a robotics-enabled office scenario and to develop two user interfaces based on augmented reality, speech recognition as well as gaze and body tracking technologies. Then, a user study has been performed to study user experience in the execution of semi-autonomous tasks in the considered scenario though both objective and subjective observations. Besides confirming the validity of the devised approach, the study provided precious indications regarding possible evolutions of both the simulation environment and the service robotic scenario considered