Social robots, robots that can connect with people and help them in their regular routines, are slowly being introduced in various real-life settings. These robots could be especially important for assisting more seasoned grown-ups with finishing regular jobs more independently, thus possibly improving their freedom and prosperity.
For a long time, analysts at the University of Bari have been researching the potential of social robots in assisted living applications.Their latest paper, distributed in UMAP’22 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization, explicitly investigates the benefit of permitting social robots who are helping seniors to get familiar with the connections between a client’s schedule and his or her mindset.
Berardina De Carolis, Stefano Ferilli, and Nicola Macciarulo wrote in their paper. “Social robots ought to help more seasoned grown-ups with day-to-day actions and, simultaneously, they ought to add to profound health by thinking about emotional elements in regular circumstances,” Berardina De Carolis, Stefano Ferilli, and Nicola Mac “The primary objective of this exploration is to examine whether it is feasible to learn relations between the client’s emotional state and everyday schedules, made by exercises, with the guide of a social robot, Pepper, for this situation.”
“Social robots should assist older persons with daily activities while also contributing to mental wellness by incorporating affective elements in everyday scenarios,”
Berardina De Carolis, Stefano Ferilli and Nicola Macciarulo
The “mind-set customized” help living methodology conceived by De Carolis and her partners depends on a framework called WoMan (Workflor Management). This framework, presented in one of their past papers, can constantly learn and refine the schedules of clients, utilizing first-request rationale thinking.
In their new review, the group executed the WoMan framework utilizing the Pepper robot. Pepper is a semi-humanoid portable robot made by SoftBank Robotics that can connect with people and identify their essential feelings.
In their paper, De Carolis, Ferilli, and Macciarulo wrote that “Lady will be utilized as a back-end module of the Daily Diary application running on the Pepper robot to gather information concerning everyday exercises and their connection to feelings and mindset.”
Up to this point, the group framed their proposed approach and explored whether it could really get familiar with the connections between a client’s everyday schedules and his/her mindset. Likewise, they made a proof of idea of their methodology, planning an exchange application for the Pepper robot called the DailyDiary (DD).
As its name suggests, the DD application can be utilized to gather comments summing up a client’s daily practice, exercises, and mindsets. The information gathered by this application is then examined by an AI model to more readily comprehend how clients are feeling while finishing various jobs.
The scientists included in their paper that “consequences of this period of the exploration will be utilized to survey the legitimacy of the methodology in surrounding senior housing facilities to make the social robot ready to offer proactive support help as well as an emotional empathic encounter.”
In their underlying assessments, De Carolis and her partners found that their learning model could figure out how to foresee everyday schedules and the relations between exercises and a client’s mind-set with great precision. In their next examinations, they intend to foster the total form of their application and test it in a true setting.
These future tests will re-survey their learning model’s exactness in foreseeing clients’ exercises and mindsets in a genuine setting. Furthermore, they will attempt to decide how senior clients experience the DD application and the Pepper robot running it, confirming whether the group’s methodology would be useful and very much acknowledged by seniors.
Assuming the analysts’ future assessments work out positively, their work could help the improvement of something else: “apparently empathic” robots, which can adjust their way of behaving to meet both the physical and profound needs of weak clients.
More information: Berardina de Carolis et al, Ambient Assisted Living and Social Robots: Towards Learning Relations between User’s Daily Routines and Mood, Adjunct Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (2022). DOI: 10.1145/3511047.3537691
