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

1548502(Mataric)预计到2050年，65岁以上的成年人数量将达到8,370万。因此，在满足老年人口快速增长的需求方面，越来越需要老年人技术来补充人类护理。这个项目采用了一种新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，这些目标侧重于老年家庭成员的福祉，包括与家庭中其他人的日常社交联系，定期的身体和认知活动，以及坚持用药。这些目标是家庭动态的一部分，涉及不同团队成员的互动，成对的、分组的或全部在一起。该项目将开发在家庭中部署社交辅助机器人的硬件和软件基础设施，以及使机器人能够适应家庭成员的方法，以帮助促进团队活力和帮助实现家庭目标。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，他们将花费两年时间进行技术开发的紧密结合过程，并与参与家庭的家庭系统评估相结合。该项目专注于工程团队的交互和动力学，将机器人作为团队的成员，嵌入到真实世界的环境中，并与其他团队成员实时交互。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护理方面充当团队成员。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期望的家庭团队目标。该项目将启用并反复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)中的影响。此外，该项目解决了团队目标实现中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。它还调查了无监督、监督和强化学习技术在老年护理领域的应用。这项研究与K-12 STEM推广方案相辅相成，包括每年为中等教育学生(6-12年级；每个讲习班最多30名学生)举办的免费互动讲习班。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.