SHB: Large: Collaborative Research: Companionbots for Proactive Therapeutic Dialog on Depression

这项合作研究调查了一种新的基于对话的家庭机器人医疗助理，以促进为老年和抑郁症患者提供更高水平的居家实时护理，提供更低的总成本和更高的生活质量。在这个项目中，将建立一个情绪化的、物理的化身，称为同伴机器人，它拥有以一种不引人注目的方式与人类接触的能力，并暂停怀疑。这款陪伴机器人将整合人类语言技术、视觉、其他感官处理和情感机器人技术，主动识别患有抑郁症的孤立和老年患者并与其对话。同伴机器人将根据患有抑郁症的用户的上下文利用主动或可陪伴的对话。这将需要用户模型、环境模型和时间处理与口头对话理解和生成的第一次多模式集成，以产生动态对话和情感交互，而不是传统的脚本对话和情感。对象识别、面部表情识别和人类活动识别将增强自然语言处理，以提供对动态对话重要的当前和历史背景。一个由科罗拉多大学博尔德大学、丹佛大学、科罗拉多州立大学安舒茨医学院和博尔德语言技术公司组成的技术研究团队将共同努力实现该项目的目标。研究人员将把这些同伴机器人作为一种工具来进行临床试验，以监测并与他们的伴侣对话，以检测身体和情绪恶化的迹象。然后，同伴机器人可以根据需要通知远程照顾者，提供警告、提醒、生活指导和治疗对话，延长独立性和生活质量，甚至拯救生命。这种系统的其他好处包括连续的、带注释的数据，以改善医患互动和分析，实时监测远程医疗保健提供者的精神状态，并最终将实时干预作为综合治疗策略的一部分。此外，这项研究将促进附属机构研究生和本科生的STEM实践和研究教育。这些同伴机器人非常适合向下一代工程师和科学家传授关键新兴技术，因为它们允许深度关注特定主题或跨学科视角，同时提供一个简单的高级界面来管理其他一切。此外，该项目将编写相关的教育材料，以支持其他人，并将向该地区的K-12班提供公共宣传。

This collaborative research investigates a new class of dialog-based, home robotic healthcare assistants to facilitate a new level of in-home, real-time care to elderly and depressed patients, providing lower total costs and higher quality of life. An emotive, physical avatar, called a companionbot, which possesses the ability to engage humans in a way that is unobtrusive and suspends disbelief will be built in this project. The companionbot will be an integration of human language technology, vision, other sensory processing and emotive robotic technology to proactively recognize and dialog with isolated and elderly patients suffering from depression. The companionbot will utilize proactive or companionable dialog based on the context with users suffering from depression. This will require the first multimodal integration of a user model, environment model, and temporal processing with spoken dialog understanding and generation to produce dynamic dialog and emotive interaction, beyond the traditional scripted dialog and emotion. Object recognition, facial expression recognition, and human activity recognition will augment natural language processing to provide current and historical context important to dynamic dialog. A team of skilled researchers, assembled from the University of Colorado Boulder, University of Denver, CU Anschutz Medical Campus, and Boulder Language Technologies, will work together to achieve the project goals. The investigators will use the companionbots as a tool to run clinical trials to monitor and dialog with their partners to detect signs of physical and emotional deterioration. The companionbots can then notify remote caregivers, as necessary, provide warnings, reminders, life coaching and therapeutic dialog, extending independence and quality of life, and even saving lives. The other benefits of such a system include continuous, annotated data to improve doctor-patient interaction and analysis, real-time monitoring of mental state for remote healthcare providers and, ultimately, real-time intervention as part of a comprehensive treatment strategy.In addition, this research will promote both STEM practice and research education at the graduate and the undergraduate levels of the affiliated institutions. The companionbots are ideal for teaching the next generation of engineers and scientists in critical emerging technologies, as they permit either a deep focus on specific topics or an interdisciplinary perspective while providing a simple high-level interface to manage everything else. Furthermore, the project will develop related educational material to support others and will provide public outreach to K-12 classes in the area.