EAGER: Studying the Dynamics of In Home Adoption of Socially Assistive Robot Companions for the Elderly

预计到2050年，65岁以上的成年人数量将达到8370万。因此，越来越需要老年人技术，以补充人类护理，以满足老年人口迅速增长的需求。该项目采用了一种新颖的方法来开发和评估老年人辅助技术：它将家庭单位视为一个团队，并专注于开发一个作为团队成员（而不是个人助手）的机器人，旨在帮助实现团队/家庭目标。在该项目中，这些目标集中在老年家庭成员的福祉上，包括与家庭其他成员的日常社会联系、定期的身体和认知活动以及药物依从性。这些目标是家庭动态的一部分，涉及不同团队成员之间的相互作用，可以是成对的，也可以是分组的，也可以是全体的。该项目将开发用于在家庭中部署社交辅助机器人的硬件和软件基础设施，以及使机器人适应家庭成员的方法，以帮助促进团队动态和帮助家庭目标的实现。该项目汇集了社会辅助机器人、老年学和社会工作领域的顶尖专家，他们将花两年的时间与参与家庭一起进行技术开发和家庭系统评估的紧密结合。这个项目的重点是工程团队的互动和动态，机器人作为团队的一员，嵌入到现实世界的环境中，并与其他团队成员实时互动。工程目标是开发数据驱动的机器人控制算法和相关的硬件和软件基础设施，使机器人能够在家庭支持的老年护理环境中作为团队成员。控制算法与硬件和软件基础设施相结合，将使机器人系统能够感知和理解家庭互动动态的相关方面，成为这些团队动态的参与者/组成部分，并影响/引导这些团队动态朝着期望的家庭团队目标发展。该项目将启用并迭代地探索机器人作为团队成员在不同交互环境（用户-家庭，用户-照顾者，家庭照顾者）中的效果。此外，该项目处理团队目标实现中的三个基本组成部分：团队绩效的评估，跨多个团队成员的行动协调，以及团队成员角色分配。它还研究了无监督、监督和强化学习技术在老年人护理领域的应用。该研究与K-12 STEM外展计划相辅相成，该计划包括每年为中学教育学生（6-12年级，每次工作坊最多30名学生）提供免费互动研讨会。简单的机器人编程和项目中正在开发的硬件和软件的演示将用于讨论辅助机器人如何在社会中发挥作用，从学生的家庭开始。

1548502(Mataric)The number of adults over the age of 65 is predicted to reach 83.7 million by 2050. There is accordingly a growing need for technologies for the elderly to complement human care in addressing the fast-growing needs of the elderly population. This project takes a novel approach to developing and evaluating an assistive technology for the elderly: it views the family unit as a team, and focuses on developing a robots as a team member (rather than individual assistant) designed to aid in the achievement of team/family goals. In the project, these goals are focused on the wellbeing of the elderly family member, and include daily social connectedness with others in the family, regular physical and cognitive activity, and medication adherence. These goals are part of the family dynamic and involve the interaction of various team members, pairwise, in subgroups, or all together. The project will develop a hardware and software infrastructure for deploying a socially assistive robot in the home and methods for enabling the robot to adapt to the family members in order to aid in facilitating team dynamics and aiding family goal achievement. The project brings together leading experts in socially assistive robotics, gerontology, and social work, who will spend two years in a tightly knit process of technology development combined with in home system evaluation with participating families. This project is focused on engineering team interactions and dynamics, with the robot as a member of the team, embedded in a real-world environment and interacting with other team members in real time. The engineering goal is to develop data-driven robot control algorithms and the associated hardware and software infrastructure for enabling robots to serve as team members in the context of family-supported eldercare. The control algorithms, combined with the hardware and software infrastructure, will enable the robot system to perceive and understand the relevant aspects of the family interaction dynamics, be a participant/component in those team dynamics, and influence/streer those team dynamics toward desired family team goals. The project will enable and then iteratively probe the effects of the robot as team member in different interaction contexts (user-family, user-caregiver, family-caregiver). Furthermore, the project tackles three fundamental components in team goal achievement: evaluation of team performance, coordination of actions across multiple team members, and team member role assignment. It also investigates the application of unsupervised, supervised, and reinforcement learning techniques to the domain of elderly care. The research is complemented with a K-12 STEM outreach program consisting of annual free interactive workshops for students in secondary education (grades 6-12; up to 30 students per workshop). Simple robot programming and demonstrations of the hardware and software being developed in the project will be used to discuss how assistive robots could play a role in society, starting with the students' families.