I-Han Kuo

Deployment of a service robot to help older people

This paper presents the first version of a mobile service robot designed for older people. Six service application modules were developed with the key objective being successful interaction between the robot and the older people. A series of trials were conducted in an independent living facility at a retirement village, with the participation of 32 residents and 21 staff. In this paper, challenges of deploying the robot and lessons learned are discussed. Results show that the robot could successfully interact with people and gain their acceptance.

Socially Assistive Robot HealthBot: Design, Implementation, and Field Trials

Socially assistive robotics is an important emerging research area. Socially assistive robotics is challenging as it is required to move robots out of laboratories and industrial settings to interact with ordinary human beings as peers, which requires social skills. The design process usually requires multidisciplinary research teams, which may comprise subject matter experts from various domains such as robotics, systems integration, medicine, psychology, gerontology, social and cognitive sciences, and neuroscience, among many others. Unlike most other robotic applications, socially assistive robotics faces some unique software and systems integration challenges. In this paper, the HealthBot robot architecture, which was designed to overcome these challenges, is presented. The presented architecture was implemented and used in several field trials. The details of the field trials are presented, and lessons learned are discussed with field trial results.

Multidisciplinary Design Approach for Implementation of Interactive Services. Communication Initiation and User Identification for Healthcare Service Robots.

In the design of service robots, a key research focus has been on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) required in service applications. HRI is one of the critical factors that determines the acceptability of a service robot. The user acceptance of a service robot and its applications is highly related to HRI, as HRI affects the user perception and user experience related to the robot. In this paper, a new design approach is proposed for designing and implementing HRI for service robot applications designed for real scenarios in the real-world environment. The objective of this design approach is to facilitate inter-disciplinary collaborations, which are essential for HRI research and for developing successful products. The proposed design approach was used in the design of the healthcare service robot “Cafero” developed at the University of Auckland in collaboration with the Electronic and Telecommunication Research Institute (ETRI) and Yujin Robot Company Ltd. of Korea. Vital signs measurement, medication management, entertainment and falls detection were implemented as service applications of Cafero.In the design process, UML and UMLi modelling diagrams were used to model the robot’s multi-modal and interactive behaviour. Interaction design patterns were defined to represent recurring interactions or social cues in HRI using UMLi notations. The proposed design approach emphasises an iterative process to allow discovery of additional HRI requirements in the early design stage and to implement through Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE).The design of communication initiation and user identification by Cafero is presented as a case study, in order to evaluate the proposed design approach. In this case study, enabling a service robot to act proactively to the presence of a potential user and identifying the user prior to providing healthcare services is presented. For the implementation, Open-RTM component-oriented framework was used.

Robots in Older People’s Homes to Improve Medication Adherence and Quality of Life: A Randomised Cross-Over Trial

Healthcare robots are being developed to help older people maintain independence. This randomised cross-over trial aimed to investigate whether healthcare robots were acceptable and feasible and whether the robots could impact quality of life, depression and medication adherence. 29 older adults living in independent units within a retirement village were given robots in their homes for 6 weeks and had a non-robot 6-week control period, in a randomised order. The robots reminded people to take medication, provided memory games, entertainment, skype calls, and blood pressure measurement. The robots were found to be acceptable and feasible, and many participants described them as useful and as friends although not all comments were positive. There were relatively few problems with robot functions. The participants’ perceptions of the robots’ agency reduced over time. The robots had no significant impact on adherence, depression or quality of life. While the robots were feasible and acceptable, improvements in their reliability and functionality may increase their efficacy.

Software platform design for personal service robots in healthcare

This paper describes the software platform design of a personal service robot with application to healthcare scenarios. The platform was designed after exploration of both the service application and software architectural design spaces. The service application considered here is a comprehensive medication management service which evolved to be one of the more complex use cases in the Healthbots project. While algorithms and user studies of human robot interaction are reported in the literature, there is less attention given to related software frameworks and tools, which are addressed in this paper. The paper focuses and solves numerous design challenges to achieve the desired functionality of the medication management service with its complex set of workflow and contextual requirements which were not present in the software platforms we had designed. The robots were used in a real world deployment scenario at an Aged Care Facility. Scenarios and results from a field trial are presented to enable the research community to understand the technological and engineering challenges of deployment of the robot system and the level of fluid integration required to achieve the desired goals of functionality and robustness in the real world.

Entertainment services of a healthcare robot system for older people in private and public spaces

In this paper, we analyze the use of entertainment services on our healthcare robot system, and find (1) how long robots were used, (2) which entertainment service was most used, (3) which music video category was most preferred, and (4) which music video was most preferred. We developed a healthcare robot system, HealthBot, and deployed several of them in an older care facility, and obtained the usage histories of three kinds of entertainment services: music videos, quotes, and pictures. We report results about the preferences of participants in private and public spaces.

Programming behaviour of a personal service robot with application to healthcare

We propose an approach for developing applications on a personal healthcare service robot. We have developed a model of representing robot behaviour through a domain specific language (DSL) and enabling authoring through a Visual Programming Environment (VPE), RoboStudio. RoboStudio is to be used by robot designers, developers and domain experts for developing social robotics behaviour in a healthcare environment. The method for authoring is visual in order to convey the robots decision logic and interaction behaviour in a more intuitive manner while retaining expressiveness. In the paper, we discuss current progress we have made in raising the level of abstraction in service application development. This will help the robotics community to make significant investment in developing programming infrastructures, better programming language support and enhancing existing programming languages through simpler syntax and expressive semantics.

An interactive robot for reminding medication to older people

The demonstration in the presented video shows the outcome of interdisciplinary research done by the Robotics Research Group (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering), the School of Population Health and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland, to develop an interactive health care assistant robot. The research aims to design human robot interaction towards automated medication support for older people [3], [4]. In the current design, the older people are guided by a Stationary Robotic Medication Management System (StRoMMS) while they take their daily medications in their independent living quarters in a retirement village. We performed a pilot user study to evaluate the hypothesized technological requirements of the robotic system as well as the clinical workflow requirements [1] taking into account the health care context. The demonstration shows a snapshot of the interaction for the main medication dialog that the older person undergoes. There are multiple interactions in a day for multiple types of medication scheduled at multiple times. We also show some features of the workflow that ensure any errors are reported in real-time, as well as a feature that ensures the medication regime can be monitored by the health care providers remotely [2] in real-time. The robot also has capabilities to engage the older people by singing and dancing with entertainment content they prefer. Qualitative results from the research is presented in the video and informed a bigger field trial in New Zealand.

Application of Fuzzy Techniques in Human-Robot Interaction - A Review

Targeting research challenges in Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR), this paper provides a review of previous work that describe robot or non-robot systems that use fuzzy logic to infer high-level human intention or activities. In comparison to statistical and probabilistic approaches which are very popular in SAR and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), this review focuses on fuzzy logic-based systems. As fuzzy logic has already been widely used in almost all research areas in robotics, this review does not consider systems that uses fuzzy logic for sensing, modelling or planning tasks except for inferencing or reasoning tasks. From this review, it was found minimal research has been done in this special research niche and is deemed to gain more attention as the research communities shifts from sensing toward modelling and inferencing in the loop of Sense-Model-Plan-Act or Sense-Plan-Act.

An efficient programming framework for socially assistive robots based on separation of robot behavior description from execution

One of the main challenges in socially assistive robotics is providing flexible and easy-to-use programming tools for users. Unlike other robots, designing socially assistive robots includes the subject-matter-experts (SMEs) from non-engineering disciplines. Therefore, the provided tools should be suitable for users with less programming experience. On the other hand, socially assistive robotic research involves field trials and user-centric studies, in which user and subject matter expert comments are used to improve the robot applications. Therefore, field programmability and customizability are key requirements. This paper presents a programming framework for socially assistive robots, which satisfies the above requirements; programmability by non-experts, field programmability and customizability. The proposed framework has been successfully implemented, deployed, and tested. Some robots with the framework presented in this paper are already in the commercialization pathway.