PRE2018 3 Group2

0LAUK0 - 2018/2019 - Q3 - group 2

Group members

Name	Student ID
Koen Botermans	0904507
Ruben Hendrix	1236095
Jakob Limpens	1019496
Iza Linders	0945517
Eleonora Opstal	0956340

Introduction

Problem Statement

We live in an ageing society, the number of elderly people is ever increasing (OECD, 2007) . As a consequence, pressure on caregivers is also rising. Researching possibilities to alleviate this pressure by means of a robotic platform is what we are going to do in the following eight weeks. However this platform cannot be any platform since the emotional comfort is vital in medical environments (ANR, 2005) . As a result our research will have as main focus the emotional response of elderly people in the presence of such a robotic agent. Except for the emotional response the dignity of this robotic platform will be assessed as well. Since our group is a multidisciplinary team this problem will be approached from both a technical perspective and a user centered perspective.

Objectives

To get a better overview of what needs to be done to complete the project, we set ourselves a couple objectives:

System objectives:

• The system should be able to express emotions in a manner that is natural, non-ambiguous and clear.
• The system should behave like a human, without entering the uncanny valley.

Research objectives:

• We want to understand how elderly react to different facial emotions/designs expressed by a robot.
• We want to optimize the way that robots show emotions to elderly-users.

State of the Art

Different themes related to our project can be identified. They are listed here, together with the relevant papers that provide the stated information.

Robot emotion expression Different papers provide an insight into the existing technology in the field of recognizing human emotion in HCI research.

Article 1: Use of social commitment robots in the care of elderly people with dementia Discussion of existing literature on social robots paired with care for elderly suffering from dementia, what contributions and cautions are bound to the use of these assistive robotic agents. Provides literature related to care of elderly with dementia

Article 2: In your face robot! The influence of a character’s embodiment on how users perceive its emotional expressions Study about the effect of a robot’s expressions and physical appearance on the perception of said robot by a user.

Article 3: Design and evaluation of emotion-display Describes the development, testing and evaluation of a robotic system that has 23 DoG for expressing realistic emotions through a humanoid face.

Article 4: Emotion interaction system for a service robot Provides a system for emotion interaction for service robots, which recognizes, analyzes and generation based on touch, voice and dialogue. The framework can be developed further to create a better system for service robots.

Article 5: Whole body emotion expression for Kobian Experiments conducted in the setting of the KOBIAN project, where different ways of expressing emotions through the entire robot’s body are tested and evaluated.

Emotion recognition
Article 6: Affective computing for HCI Computing that relates to, arises from or deliberately influences emotion. The affective computing aims to reduce user frustration during an interaction. It enables machines to recognize meaningful patterns of such expression. It explains different types of communication (parallel vs. non-parallel).

Article 7: Emotion in HCI Consists of a large elaboration on emotion, mood, effects of affect which yields performance and memory. Along with its causes and measurements. There is an interaction of affective design and HCI.

Article 8: Emotion, physiology and expression Emotion-specific autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity was studied in elderly people who followed muscle-by-muscle instructions for constructing facial proto- types of emotional expressions and re-lived past emotional experiences.

Article 9: Emotion recognition deficits in the elderly Report on how two studies show how elderly have difficulty recognizing anger and sadness when shown faces. The two studies provide methods for measuring the ability of emotion recognition in humans.

Article 10: Emotion recognition in HCI provides a definition of several emotions and their relation to physical responses (breathing, facial expressions, etc.). Describes how a computer can track and analyze a face to compute the emotion the subject is in. Relates to the project in the sense that it provides an insight in how input data can be gathered, analyzed and used for the purpose of mimicking or mirroring by a robot.

Assistive technology for elderly
This category focusses mostly on robotic care for elderly living at home. Articles such as article 15 and article 11 explore the effect of robots to the social, psychological and physiological levels, providing a base for knowing what types of results certain actions yield. Article 14 explores six ethical issues related to deploying robots for elderly care, article 13 provides more knowledge when it compares children, elderly and robots and their roles in relationships with humans. Article 12 looks at the available technologies for tracking elderly at home, keeping them safe and alerting others when needed.

Dementia and Alzheimer's
Closely related to elderly are the diseases Dementia and Alzheimer’s. These diseases affect the brain of a patient, making them forgetful or unable to complete tasks in their day-to-day life without help. Article 16 elaborates on this and explains the impacts and a possible framework to counter these diseases is proposed. Article 17 discusses whether an entertainment robot is useful to be deployed in care for elderly with dementia.

Measuring tools
Here, papers are collected that provide aid for designing a robotic system, article 18 discusses some of the difficulties in measuring affection in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). For designing a system that is capable of expressing emotion, article 19 and article 20 show recent developments when designing a ‘face’ or whole body to express emotion to a user.

Left over papers: Article 21: Dominance and valence - a two factor model for emotion in HCI Social aspects of emotions is elaborated, together with the implementation to the human-computer interaction. A model is tested and accordingly a system is designed with the goal to give a means of affective input that can use for example emoticons.

Article 22: Enhancing the therapeutic potential of hospital environments by increasing the personal control and emotional comfort of hospitalized patients. Emotional comfort was researched in patients that found themselves in a therapeutic state. It provides an understanding of the role of personal control in recovery and aspects of the hospital environment that impact on hospitalized patients’ feelings of personal control.

Article 23: Functional changes in the activity of brain regions underlying emotion processing in the elderly. Evidence is provided for altered functional responses in brain regions subserving emotional behavior in elderly subjects during the perceptual processing of angry and fearful facial expressions, compared to youngsters.

Article 24: PPAR - Graying of the global population Collection of evidence for the greying of the world’s population, with causes and consequences. Gives three challenges paired with the greying society. Shows relevance to project subject.

Article 25: Working for health and growth investing in the workforce Indicates the importance of a healthy community to the efficiency and economics growth. Pointing out the goals of improving the healthcare system and how these improvements can be made.

Project setup

Planning

The planning for our group can be viewed here

Deliverables

At the end of this project period, these are the things we want to have completed to present:

• This wiki page
• A study report
• A prototype