SCH: INT: Pediatric motor rehabilitation via socially interacting robot swarms

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Each year, 10,000 infants in the U.S. alone develop cerebral palsy and 4,000 infants have birth defects of the spine and the brain. The motor delays for these infants have lifelong social and economic consequences, not only for the families, but also for the society as a whole. Currently, infants with mobility impairments do not have access to the type of adaptive, dynamic, and autonomous play-based activity that mobile robots can provide. Our current scientific understanding of the significant neuroplastic and neuromuscular changes in developing children is not at pace with the state-of-the-art in pediatric rehabilitation, which still cannot meet the needs of millions of school-aged children with special needs. By the age of 4 or 5, most of these children have permanently lost the daily rich motor and cognitive stimulation of the early years. In addition, the vast majority of therapy activities are initiated and directed by adult caregivers; yet exclusive and continuous adult control can be exhausting and deprive the child from the chance to freely explore her dynamic environment. This project’s research activities will introduce the scientific innovations necessary for robotic toy swarm-enabled high-dosage pediatric rehabilitation. The robotic toy swarms will be designed to be responsive to children’s brain activity so they can be both physically and intellectually engaged. The envisioned innovations will not only disrupt the status quo in infant motor rehabilitation, but can also alleviate current stressors to special need children caregivers. In this way, this project will promote directly one of the key desired societal outcomes identified by NSF, which is the improvement of well-being of individuals in society, and indirectly that of increasing the economic competitiveness of the U.S. primarily through the expected increase in productivity for individuals with motor disabilities over the course of their life.This proposal puts forth a research plan that enables the development of an enriched infant motor rehabilitation environment, which involves stimulation by swarms of robotic toys that are socially interacting with infants in play-based activities. Our hypothesis is that appropriately designed swarm motion behaviors can keep infants engaged in active game-play, and that child-swarm interaction can be coordinated in real-time based on non-invasive imagery and electroencephalograpy (EEG) measurements. The research plan expands along four key axes that aim at the following specific goals: (i) the design of collective motion behaviors specifically for social child-robot interaction; (ii) the development of resource-aware perception algorithms for real-time monitoring and tracking of this dynamic interaction; (iii) the production of EEG data processing methods to provide real-time feedback on subject engagement; and finally (iv) the integration of this technology into an adaptive and reactive enriched environment that delivers intervention and assesses motor rehabilitation outcomes. This proposal pushes the envelope in pediatric motor rehabilitation by introducing coordinated socially-interacting smart toys as an adaptive human-machine interface within an enriched environment. The intellectual contributions include (a) new intervention pathways to neuroplastic and neuromuscular changes in developing children that utilize directed play-based interaction; (b) a new mathematical architecture for regulating human-swarm interaction that is not based on direct human input or explicit commands; (c) quantitative neurophysiological metrics of infant engagement with highly mobile and interactive smart toys; and (d) new resource-aware, robust and consistent multi-target tracking algorithms that leverage deep networks. These contributions will be significant because they will identify specific fundamental relationships between coordinated object motion behavior and infant perception and action, and exploit them to drive therapeutic interventions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.