NRI: Small: Collaborative Research: Don't Read my Face: Tackling the Challenges of Facial Masking in Parkinson's Disease Rehabilitation through Co-Robot Mediators

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The overarching scientific goal of this project is two-fold: (1) to develop a robotic architecture endowed with moral emotional control mechanisms, abstract moral reasoning, and a theory of mind that allow corobots to be sensitive to human affective and ethical demands, and (2) to develop a specific instance of the architecture for a co-robot mediator between people with "facial masking" due to Parkinson's disease (PD) that reduces their ability to signal emotion, pain, personality and intentions to their family caregivers, and health care providers who often misinterpret the lack of emotional expressions as disinterest and an inability to adhere to treatment regimen, resulting in stigmatization. To tackle these problems, the project brings together two roboticists with extensive prior experience in robot ethics and modeling emotions as well as implementing them in integrated autonomous robotic systems. The robotics expertise is combined with that of an expert in early PD rehabilitation and daily social life. The project will build on extensive software, hardware and data set resources, including complex robotic control architectures with ethical control mechanisms, personality and emotion models, and affect and natural language capabilities.The general expected outcome of the project is an architecture for co-robots that can be adapted to a great variety of health care scenarios in an effort to enrich and dignify already stressed and stigmatized relationships between humans. The project also includes novel educational efforts such as a course in occupational therapy robotics as well as significant K?12 outreach through the Tufts Centers for STEM Diversity and for Engineering Education and Outreach, as well as various important community and public activities such as presentations on health care robotics to focus and patient groups.