Elderly people with limited mobility may soon come to be served by robots in a manner as if they are being served by other persons, thanks to a collaborative study by three University of Illinois at Chicago engineers and a Rush University nursing specialist.
“We want to help elderly people communicate with robots, to tell them what they need, and to perform physical activities,” said Milos Zefran, UIC associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.
The three-year study, supported by a grant of 989,000 dollars from the National Science Foundation, is aimed at developing software to allow the elderly to communicate with robots that can respond to a wide range of verbal language, non-verbal gestures, and touch.
“If we can help the elderly remain independent and continue living in their own homes, that will improve their health outlook while relieving the burden on family members and health care providers,” said Zefran, the lead researcher.
The researchers say that their communication interface software will have at its core a novel adaptive and reliable recognition methodology called Recognition by Indexing and Sequencing (RISq), which will allow the robot to comprehend speech altered by impairments and to learn and adapt to such speech.
To enable a robot to understand and correctly respond to various forms of human touch, the researchers will combine techniques from natural language processing and haptics, a scientific term to describe the computerized sense of touch.
I will be following this closely. This sounds interesting.
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