Accepted paper of the AAAI 2020 Spring Symposium "Applied AI in Healthcare: Safety, Community, and the Environment" (Stanford University). Because of the COVID-19 outbreak, the physical meeting has been postponed
Residents in retirement and nursing homes have sexual needs just like other people. However, the semi-public situation makes it difficult for them to satisfy these existential concerns. In addition, they may not be able to meet a suitable partner or find it difficult to have a relationship for mental or physical reasons. People who live or are cared for at home can also be affected by this problem. Perhaps they can host someone more easily and discreetly than the residents of a health facility, but some elderly and disabled people may be restricted in some ways. This article examines the opportunities and risks that arise with regard to care robots with sexual assistance functions. First of all, it deals with sexual well-being. Then it presents robotic systems ranging from sex robots to care robots. Finally, the focus is on care robots, with the author exploring technical and design issues. A brief ethical discussion completes the article. The result is that care robots with sexual assistance functions could be an enrichment of the everyday life of people in need of care, but that we also have to consider some technical, design and moral aspects.
Artificial intelligence technologies that can assist with at-home tasks have the potential to help older adults age in place. Robot assistance in particular has been applied towards physical and cognitive support for older adults living independently at home. Surveys, questionnaires, and group interviews have been used to understand what tasks older adults want robots to assist them with. We build upon prior work exploring older adults' task preferences for robot assistance through field interviews situated within older adults' aging contexts. Our findings support results from prior work indic…
SkinGrip: An Adaptive Soft Robotic Manipulator with Capacitive Sensing for Whole-Limb Bed Bathing Assistance
Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院机器人与智能机器研究所）；Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人学院）
Robotic bathing assistance has long been considered an important and practical task in healthcare. Yet, achieving flexible and efficient cleaning tasks on the human body is challenging, since washing the body involves direct human-robot physical contact and simple, safe, and effective devices are needed for bathing and hygiene. In this paper, we present a meso-scale wearable robot that can locomote along the human body to provide bathing and skin care assistance. We evaluated the cleaning performance of the robot system under different scenarios. The experiments on the pipe show that the robot…
University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；ATLAS Institute（ATLAS研究所）
In shared control, advances in autonomous robotics are applied to help empower a human user in operating a robotic system. While these systems have been shown to improve efficiency and operation success, users are not always accepting of the new control paradigm produced by working with an assistive controller. This mismatch between performance and acceptance can prevent users from taking advantage of the benefits of shared control systems for robotic operation. To address this mismatch, we develop multiple types of visualizations for improving both the legibility and perceived predictability …
Versatile robotic caregivers could benefit millions of people worldwide, including older adults and people with disabilities. Recent work has explored how robotic caregivers can learn to interact with people through physics simulations, yet transferring what has been learned to real robots remains challenging. Virtual reality (VR) has the potential to help bridge the gap between simulations and the real world. We present Assistive VR Gym (AVR Gym), which enables real people to interact with virtual assistive robots. We also provide evidence that AVR Gym can help researchers improve the perform…
As AI-enabled robots enter the realm of healthcare and caregiving, it is important to consider how they will address the dimensions of care and how they will interact not just with the direct receivers of assistance, but also with those who provide it (e.g., caregivers, healthcare providers etc.). Caregiving in its best form addresses challenges in a multitude of dimensions of a person's life: from physical, to social-emotional and sometimes even existential dimensions (such as issues surrounding life and death). In this study we use semi-structured qualitative interviews administered to healt…
Existing work in physical robot caregiving is limited in its ability to provide long-term assistance. This is majorly due to (i) lack of well-defined problems, (ii) diversity of tasks, and (iii) limited access to stakeholders from the caregiving community. We propose Structuring Physically Assistive Robotics for Caregiving with Stakeholders-in-the-loop (SPARCS) to address these challenges. SPARCS is a framework for physical robot caregiving comprising (i) Building Blocks, models that define physical robot caregiving scenarios, (ii) Structured Workflows, hierarchical workflows that enable us to…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
While robots present an opportunity to provide physical assistance to older adults and people with mobility impairments in bed, people frequently rest in bed with blankets that cover the majority of their body. To provide assistance for many daily self-care tasks, such as bathing, dressing, or ambulating, a caregiver must first uncover blankets from part of a person's body. In this work, we introduce a formulation for robotic bedding manipulation around people in which a robot uncovers a blanket from a target body part while ensuring the rest of the human body remains covered. We compare two a…
Social assistance robots in health and elderly care have the potential to support and ease human lives. Given the macrosocial trends of aging and long-lived populations, robotics-based care research mainly focused on helping the elderly live independently. In this paper, we introduce Robot DE NIRO, a research platform that aims to support the supporter (the caregiver) and also offers direct human-robot interaction for the care recipient. Augmented by several sensors, DE NIRO is capable of complex manipulation tasks. It reliably interacts with humans and can autonomously and swiftly navigate th…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Enway GmbH（Enway有限公司）
Autonomous robots have the potential to serve as versatile caregivers that improve quality of life for millions of people worldwide. Yet, conducting research in this area presents numerous challenges, including the risks of physical interaction between people and robots. Physics simulations have been used to optimize and train robots for physical assistance, but have typically focused on a single task. In this paper, we present Assistive Gym, an open source physics simulation framework for assistive robots that models multiple tasks. It includes six simulated environments in which a robotic ma…
Robustness Testing of Multi-Modal Models in Varied Home Environments for Assistive Robots
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Institute for Information and Language Processing（信息与语言处理研究所）；Munich Center of Machine Learning (MCML)（慕尼黑机器学习中心）
Robots have the potential to improve health monitoring outcomes for the elderly by providing doctors, and caregivers with information about the person's behavior, health activities and their surrounding environment. Over the years, less work has been done to enable robots to preserve information for longer periods of time, on the order of months and years of data, and use this contextual information to answer queries. Time complexity to process this massive sensor data in a timely fashion, inability to anticipate the future queries in advance and imprecision involved in the results have been t…
