Sangseung Kang

Effects of Silver-Care-Robot Program on Cognitive Function, Depression, and Activities of Daily Living for Institutionalized Elderly People

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to identify the effects on cognitive function, depression, and activities of daily living of Silver-Care-Robot Program for institutionalized elders. METHODS This study was a nonequivalent control group pretest-posttest design. The participants were 42 institutionalized elders (17 in the experimental group and 25 in the control group). The Silver-Care-Robot Program was provided as an intervention which was conducted twice a week for 5 weeks. The Silver-Care-Robot Program is an integrated entertainment program to help the mental, emotional, and physical health of elderly people. Pre-test was conducted on the two groups, and, in order to examine the effects of intervention, a post-test was conducted after 5 weeks. RESULTS There were significant differences in cognitive function and ADL (activities of daily living) between two groups after the program. But the difference in depression in the institutionalized elders was not statistically significant between the two groups. CONCLUSION The Silver-Care-Robot Program should be considered as a regular program for cognitive function and activities of daily living for institutionalized elders.

Modeling of multiple agent based cryptographic key recovery protocol

When a receiver of a ciphertext message can not decrypt the message due to the fact that he has lost his private-key, the private-key of the receiver and session-key of the message need to be recovered. We demonstrate how we have modeled and analyzed a new type of multiple agent based key recovery protocol. It is characterized by key encapsulation approach, protocol generalization, secret choice of key recovery agents and fork/join of session-keys by random-keys. The proposed protocol is formally modeled by a new pictorial model, an extended cryptographic timed Petri net (ECTPN). Recoverability of a session-key as well as performance of the protocol is verified by using a reachability graph of the ECTPN.

Object recognition for cell manufacturing system

The development of cell manufacturing process using object recognition has been interested in automated factory. But it is not trivial work to recognize object because features transformed from illumination and diversified field needs have caused challenge problem in object detection and recognition. The recognition reliability in real world environment can be increased by object, which preserves inherent feature and has invariance feature to scale, rotation or translation. In this paper, an illumination and rotation invariant object recognition is proposed. First, a binary image reserving clean object edges is achieved using DoG filter and local adaptive binarization. An object region from background is extracted with compensated edges that reserves geometry information of object. The object is recognized using neural network, which is trained with object classes that are categorized by object type and rotation angle. Standard shape model represented object class is used to estimate the pose of recognized object, which is handled by a robot. The simulation has been processed to evaluate feasibility of the proposed method that shows the accuracy of 99.86% and the matching speed of 0.03 seconds on ETRI database, which has 16,848 object images that has captured in various lighting environment.

A robot platform for children and its action control

As endowing a robot with emotion, it facilitates human-robot interaction. Such a robot system employs a technical method of creating an emotion or selecting a behavior using various sensors such as image, voice and tactile sensors mounted inside and outside a robot. In this paper, we introduce a robot platform which is named RABIE. The robot is a networked robot platform for providing various robotic services for to take care of children with the functions of interactive communication, proactive monitoring, and creative play. We also present a method of action control for the robot applying emotions. The robot is the thing which induces the intimate sense to children and contributes to the emotional stability of children. It will be able to be used for childcare services based on the action interpretation and artificial emotion.

Bin picking for the objects of non-Lambertian reflectance without using an explicit object model

Objects with non-Lambertian reflecting surfaces suffer severe appearance changes according to the change of observers angle of view. Thus it is difficult to obtain a consistent object model. This paper addresses the problem of bin picking for such objects without using explicit object models. Due to the above-mentioned reasons, traditional pattern matching approaches are difficult to apply. Furthermore, 3D sensors often fail to capture these objects correctly, which also disables the approaches based on 3D object models. Considering these limitations, this paper proposes a novel algorithm that tries to find a reasonable pickup point by investigating the status of the pile in the bin instead of trying to perfectly isolate single object from the pile and measure full pose information. For the purpose, feature point matching between stereo cameras is adopted to retrieve approximate 3D information of the pile. Additionally, by associating these corresponding point pairs with the binary patches around the point, corresponding binary patch pairs are detected, which is evaluated by a proposed objective function to select the most appropriate candidate for the pickup operation.

Interaction control for postural correction on a riding simulation system

A horseback riding simulator is a robotic machine that simulates the motion of horseback riding. In this paper, we present an interaction control system for a horseback riding simulator. The proposed system provides a postural correction function suited to the user based on their historical log and specialized posture coaching data. The system has adopted certain schemes for posture detection and recognition of the identified user as a way to recommend customized exercise modes. Our experiments show that including these techniques will help users maintain good posture while riding. Categories and Subject Descriptors J.7 [Computer Applications]: Computers in Other Systems; H.5.m [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Miscellaneous

A study on service robot system for elder care

This paper presents an elder care robot system for older people. An elder care robot system provides human-robot interaction application and monitoring service. The study was carried out for five weeks in nursing homes, with the participation of 17 residents. We have conducted a t-test to compare the difference between satisfaction and usability evaluation for the residents and the staff.

Development of an experimental platform for child friendly emotional robot

It becomes to extend robot service domains to user friendly emotional services from simple passive services in the ubiquitous computing environment. In this paper, we present a development case of an experimental robot platform for the URC emotional model. The emotional robot platform is the thing which induces the intimate sense to children and contributes to the emotional stability of children for the experiment of the URC emotion model. This is able to make use of the robot-assisted activity and robot-assisted therapy through the emotional mutual response with robot and human. Moreover, it will be able to be used for child-care services based on the action interpretation and artificial emotion.

Human age estimation using multi-class SVM

Age estimation from face images has attracted attention because it is expected to have many application fields and growing interest. Human age estimation is very difficult tasks because a person has a different in appearance, which varies along with environment even same age. And also, pose, lighting condition or expression has an effect to estimate human age. Age estimation has challenged due to aforementioned problem even it has various potential application fields. In this paper, age estimation using Gabor feature and support vector machine as a classifier has proposed. Age-specific face images has saved in database, which has captured in real world environment. Age estimation result has applied to interact with sports simulator, which provides specialized information to each person, who wants to get individualized exercise model on sports simulator. We have evaluated age estimation performance on ETRI database, which has constructed during several months in real world environment.

Vision-based bin picking system for industrial robotics applications

The vision-based bin picking using object recognition has been considered as an innovative manufacturing process in industrial robotics applications. In bin picking system, pick and place tasks are performed by robot which has been processed by measuring object pose. But it has to address challenge problems such as object appearance distorted by overlapping parts, lighting variation or reflection, picking from randomly piled parts in a bin. This research is to investigate a vision-based bin-picking method, which provides a robust and efficient method to recognize object and to estimate pose with multiple vision sensors.