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

1548502（Mataric）预计到2050年，65岁以上的成年人人数将达到8370万。因此，在满足老年人口快速增长的需求方面，越来越需要为老年人提供技术，以补充人类护理。 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：它将家庭单元视为一个团队，并专注于开发一种机器人作为团队成员（而不是个人助理），旨在帮助实现团队/家庭目标。在该项目中，这些目标的重点是老年家庭成员的福祉，包括与家庭中其他人的日常社会联系，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，涉及到不同团队成员的互动，两两互动，小组互动，或者一起互动。该项目将开发一个硬件和软件基础设施，用于在家中部署社交辅助机器人，以及使机器人能够适应家庭成员的方法，以帮助促进团队动态和帮助家庭实现目标。 该项目汇集了社会辅助机器人，老年学和社会工作方面的领先专家，他们将花两年时间进行紧密的技术开发过程，并与参与家庭进行家庭系统评估。该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，嵌入在现实世界的环境中，并与其他团队成员在真实的时间进行互动。工程目标是开发数据驱动的机器人控制算法以及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人护理中担任团队成员。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/组件，并影响/引导这些团队动态实现所需的家庭团队目标。该项目将启用，然后迭代探测机器人作为团队成员在不同的交互环境（用户-家庭，用户-护理人员，家庭-护理人员）中的影响。此外，该项目解决了团队目标实现的三个基本组成部分：团队绩效评估，多个团队成员之间的行动协调，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推广计划相配合，该计划包括为中等教育学生（6-12年级;每个研讨会最多30名学生）举办的年度免费互动研讨会。简单的机器人编程和项目中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.