SCH: EXP: Home+, An Intelligent and Interoperable Suite of Robotic Furnishings, Learning and Evolving with Their Users

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The number of older persons in the United States is substantially increasing, as is the cost of health care. Accompanying these trends is a growing scarcity of caretakers, care deliverers, and care facilities to attend to our growing elder population. Technology supporting health for older adults tends to be limited to computerized monitoring systems and, potentially someday in the future, as assistive 'humanoid' robots that look and function something like us. Our homes and their many furnishings, meanwhile, remain conventional, low-tech, and maladaptive to life changes. To promote independent living, this research team from architectural design, robotics, and human factors explores how our homes can be outfitted with furnishings of advanced functionality. This project, home+, is a collection of robotic home furnishings that fits easily into any conventional home to increase the quality of life of individuals with impaired mobility and cognitive functioning by enabling routine domestic activities. This research project will: (1) establish the needs and wants of older people wishing to age in place, identifying those aspects of the home+ concept that best promise to support independent living; (2) design robotic furnishings, accordingly; (3) test these furnishing to determine how well they interact with each other and with the people that use them; (4) define the choreography by which these furnishings and their users interact; and (5) evaluate how well home+ supports typical users performing ten routine home tasks that define a capacity for independent living. The team will gain insights not only from the targeted populations and healthcare professions who may benefit most by home+, but also from a wider audience. This outreach aspect of the home+ project will culminate in a workshop that seeks marketplace and practice support for advancing the prototype. The majority of seniors want to age in place in their homes. To realize this goal, this project will: (1) conduct a needs assessment of older adults; (2) iteratively co-design and usability test robotic furnishings that recognize, communicate with, and partly remember each other in interaction with human users (interoperability); (3) define the pattern language of interactions for this cyber-human system; and (4) evaluate the efficacy of home+ by comparing performance on 10 routine home tasks defining a capacity for independent living for individuals with and without home+. Drawing on research and formalism in distributed robotics, the team will focus efforts on implementing and evaluating three software environments for home+: (1) a centralized architecture, with all sensory information, processing, command and control at a single source; (2) a distributed architecture, with localized sensing, processing, and control, and minimal interactions between elements; and (3), a combination of the first two, with a dedicated interface layer between the high-level strategies of (1) and the reactive behaviors of (2). Intellectually, this approach can be viewed as establishing a bridge between traditional robotics and smart, robotically enhanced, physical built environments.