In the United States, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) states that children with a physical disability are entitled to a "free appropriate public education that emphasizes special education and related services designed to meet their unique needs and prepare them for further education, employment, and independent living." Unfortunately, access to necessary assistive robotic technology remains unequal and children with physical disabilities and movement disorders are largely overlooked. However, recent successes in commercial robots appear to foreshadow an explosion of promising robotic applications for individuals with disabilities. Not only can robots be tasked to assist with Activities of Daily Living (ADL) but they can also help individuals through rehabilitation exercises such that therapists and family members can provide assistance in other arenas. The major barrier is that, to date, most assistive robotic devices are not designed for children. And although robotic systems for rehabilitation can generally be used to record information about motor performance during active movements, these systems are not ideal for rehabilitation with respect to children. This causes a unique challenge for deploying such robotic devcies for this target demographic.
To overcome this barrier, state-of-the-art techniques must be created to facilitate the interaction necessary for robots to be useful for therapeutic rehabilitation with respect to children. Based on the fact that logically, animate playthings naturally engage children, the goal of this project is to fuse play and rehabilitation techniques using a robotic design to induce childrobot interaction that will be entertaining as well as effective for pediatric rehabilitation. Of importance within this proposed work are approaches that allow therapists to provide instruction to robots on rehabilitation tasks that can be remapped to play behaviors specific to the individual child. In addition, robots must have internal perception and inference algorithms that allow them to learn new play behaviors and incorporate them to evoke corresponding behaviors in the child.
Major research questions are (1) How can child play behavior most effectively be assessed and shared with an assistive robot, (2) How can this knowledge be captured and generalized into behaviors useful for rehabilitation and (3) What are the most effective robot interfaces for communicating these behaviors both to the therapist for evaluation and the child for directing movement.
Intellectual Merit: The objective of this research effort is to further rehabilitation techniques for children by developing and validating the core technologies needed to integrate therapy instruction with child-robot play interaction in order to improve pediatric rehabilitation. A principal goal of the research endeavor is to examine how evaluation of upper and/or lower limb body movement can be achieved through robot observation and how different rehabilitation exercises can be recoded to allow the mapping of therapist instruction to play behaviors. The focus is on using human-centered capabilities to enable robots to assist in rehabilitation exercises, an ability that is increasingly needed, especially given the desire to have daily therapeutic activities performed safely and consistently in almost any home environment.
Broader Impact: The successful development of a framework that builds upon proven human-centered observation techniques has the ability to tremendously increase the capabilities of robots that interact with children in a safe and effective manner. The significance of the approach will be emphasized in terms of providing assistance for children with cerebral palsy, but the results of this effort could lay the basis for similar efforts for children with varying disabilities. The PIs plan to incorporate these approaches into courses designed for robotics and software engineering. In addition, the education plan will incorporate many of these ideas into a "boot-camp" workshop for underrepresented students. Undergraduate research projects and demonstrations to middle-school students are anticipated to inspire and encourage the next generation of engineers and scientists and acclimate them into a new robot-integrated world.
