PRE2019 4 Group6

Group Members

Name	Student ID	Study	Email
Coen Aarts	0963485	Computer Science	c.p.a.aarts@student.tue.nl
Max van IJsseldijk	1325930	Mechanical Engineering	m.j.c.b.v.ijsseldijk@student.tue.nl
Rick Mannien	1014475	Electrical Engineering	r.mannien@student.tue.nl
Venislav Varbanov	1284401	Computer Science	v.varbanov@student.tue.nl

TODO

Group chooses a subject (in the core of robotics, USE aspects are leading, can involve study, analysis, design, prototype etc.)

%% Facial/Emotional Recognition with Chatbot

Problem statement

For the past few decades, the population of old people has been rapidly increasing, due to the advancement of healthcare education. This rapid increase means that a lot more caretakers are necessary to help get those people through the day. Not only physically, but also mentally. Depression and loneliness are right around the corner for a lot of old people if there is not enough interaction with caretakers or family members. One study showed that there is a significant relationship between depression and loneliness of the elderly. Meaning that if there is not enough social interaction, they will have a high chance of developing a severe depression further growing the feeling of loneliness.[1] It is therefore vital that there are enough caretakers to prevent this. Unfortunately, the shortage of caretakers is growing. To combat this the usage of care take robots is being developed quite extensively. These robots can not yet replace the full physical help a real person can give but can give some mental help by giving the elderly someone to talk to. This social interaction can include having a simple conversation with the person or routing a call to family members. In order to have a more complicated conversation, the robot requires to understand more about the state of the person. Finding the state of a person is very important as humans are emotional creatures. If a robot could get a clue how someone is feeling, this could greatly improve the interaction. While increasing the intelligence of the robot would solve this issue, this proves to be very difficult. Therefore, only small steps in increasing the robots world view can be made.

Objective

The proposal for this project is to use emotion detection in real-time to get a feeling about how the person is feeling so that it can use this information to further help the person. This reading of emotions from the face will not be perfect, but there are already some good results using neural networks.[2] However, the implementation of this emotion detection for specific use on the elderly with a chatbot has not been explored very deeply.

Who are the users? (c)

%% Homebound elderlies

What do they require? (c)

%% Emotional Support

Approach(r), planning(v), milestones(v) and deliverables(v)

Who’s doing what?

- Max - Rick - Venislav - Coen

SotA: literature study, at least 25 relevant scientific papers and/or patents studied, summary on the wiki!(all)

[1]. Misra N. Singh A.(2009, June) Loneliness, depression and sociability in old age, referenced on 27/04/2020

[2] Zhentao Liu, Min Wu, Weihua Cao, Luefeng Chen, Jianping Xu, Ri Zhang, Mengtian Zhou, Junwei Mao. A Facial Expression Emotion Recognition Based Human-robot Interaction System. IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica, 2017, 4(4): 668-676 http://html.rhhz.net/ieee-jas/html/2017-4-668.htm

Approach

This project has multiple problems that need to be solved in order to create a system / robot that is able to combat the emotional problems that the elderly are facing. In order to categorize the problems are split into three main parts:

Technical

The main technical problem faced for our robot is to be able to reliable read the emotional state of another person and using that data being able to process this data. After processing the robot should be able to act accordingly to a set of different actions.

Social / Emotional

The robot should be able to act accordingly, therefore research needs to be done to know what types of actions the robot can perform in order to get positive results. One thing the robot could be able to do is have a simple conversation with the person or start the recording of an audio book in order to keep the person active during the day.

Physical

What type of physical presence of the robot is optimal. Is a more conventional robot needed that has a somewhat humanoid look. Or does a system that interacts using speakers and different screens divided over the room get better results. Maybe a combination of both.

The main focus of this project will be the technical problem stated however for a more complete use-case the other subject should be researched as well.

Papers on Emotions, Creating the AI and creating the Chatbot

meetings

Weekly Meetings on Monday (start at 10:00) and Thursdays (at 13:30)

Name	Time Spent (hrs)	Description
Coen	x	Introduction Lecture + Meeting 1
Rick	x	Introduction Lecture + Meeting 1
Venislav	x	Introduction Lecture + Meeting 1
Max	1 hour meeting + 4 hours research writing introduction	Introduction Lecture + Meeting 1