This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The purpose of this study is to develop a communication interface that will enable older people to effectively communicate with robotic assistants, allowing them in this way to remain living safely in their homes. The proposed communication interface will be: (1) multimodal, that is supporting spoken, gestural and physical interactions, as all these typically occur simultaneously when people communicate with one another, and (2) adaptive so that the robotic assistant will adjust to the older person rather than the older person to the robotic assistant. The combination of speech, gestures and physical interactions (haptics) has received only limited attention, but it will be critical for successful deployment of assistive robots for many elderly individuals. The transformative component of this research is to view haptics as one of the drivers of the dialogue between the user and the robot, and to study its relation to speech and gestures through language processing methods. To adapt to each user, the interpretation of the speech, gestures and haptic signals will be performed by means of RISq (Recognition by Indexing and Sequencing), a novel, adaptive and reliable recognition methodology. Finally, a formal and modular control design methodology will be developed, that guarantees that the robot responds safely and reliably to the interpretation of the user intent provided by dialogue processing.
Robot assistive technology holds immense promise for the future. Supporting the independent functioning of older people so that they can safely remain living in the community is of paramount importance, especially since the world's population is aging at an ever increasing pace. However, one of the main obstacles to the widespread use of robot assistants is the lack of interfaces that are easy to use for the elderly and allow the robot to be used in complex real-world environments such as a typical apartment. The proposed research aims to develop new tools that will enable robot developers to fill this void. The research could also have significant implications for the delivery of institutionally based health care. The deployment of robots to assist nursing personnel in hospitals and long-term care facilities, as well as at home, has enormous implications for improved health outcomes and quality of life for older patients while minimizing costs of care. Furthermore, the reduction of the nursing workload by such robot assistants promises to alleviate the critical shortage of nursing personnel in the USA that is only expected to worsen.
