An Intelligent Socially Assistive Robot for Health Care

The development of socially assistive robots for health care applications can provide measurable improvements in patient safety, quality of care, and operational efficiencies by playing an increasingly important role in patient care in the fast pace of crowded clinics, hospitals and nursing/veterans homes. However, there are a number of research issues that need to be addressed in order to design such robots. In this paper, we address two main limitations to the development of intelligent socially assistive robots: (i) identification of human body language via a non-contact sensory system and categorization of these gestures for determining the accessibility level of a person during human-robot interaction, and (ii) decision making control architecture design for determining the learning-based task-driven behavior of the robot during assistive interaction. Preliminary experiments presented show the potential of the integration of the aforementioned techniques into the overall design of such robots intended for assistive scenarios.Copyright © 2008 by ASME