Tether: Alleviating Loneliness with Assistive Robotic Social Media Dialog

Tether：通过辅助机器人社交媒体对话缓解孤独感

• 批准号: RGPIN-2021-03139
• 负责人: Li, Jamy
• 金额: $ 2.11万
• 依托单位: Ryerson University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2022-01-01 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=759668
• 关键词: Tether; Alleviating; Loneliness; Assistive; Robotic

Loneliness affects 40% of Canadians age 65 or older, particularly under-represented older adults. By 2025, that represents 16 million Canadians. Voice assistants and assistive robots are an emerging healthcare home technology (expected to reach $26 billion USD by 2030). Our interactions with these assistants are currently limited to short conversations about functional tasks. "Tether" is a research effort to build assistive robotic social media dialog technologies to reduce loneliness. To do this, Tether develops cloud computing, voice and robot software and hardware to alleviate loneliness and social isolation by connecting older adults to social media content. My main objective is to create low-cost, speaker-size robots that speak the way we do, rather than making us speak like robots, to alleviate loneliness. Instead of robots using repetitive scripts that don't support long-term interaction, I propose using social media to enable personally relevant, flexible, ongoing, multi-response conversations without repetitive question-and-answers. Social media can provide the backbone of data about relationships and conversation topics so that these systems can talk directly about people in our lives - in contrast to the recent trend of conversational agents that talk about functional tasks like playing music. Therefore, Tether's objective is an integrated system architecture and protocol for building social media assistive robots that employ perception, reasoning and artificial intelligence, while addressing loneliness. I shall use microphone arrays and human-robot interaction data to classify user activity and detect two types of loneliness. I propose to develop a dialog system for naturalistic casual conversations using a hybrid recommendation engine and expert model to pick what social media messages to show lonely people, then use machine learning of human casual conversation with a mutual information model that rewards novelty to determine how to say it. Furthermore, whereas there are social concerns about older adults becoming "friends" with a robot, my research program balances this by building intelligent robots that have social mediation roles. The societal goal of the technology is to learn how to naturally mediate social data to connect people with their communities. Today, it's important for people to be able to take control of their social lives and how they use technology. Thus, this program directly involves citizens with loneliness from under-represented groups in the robot development process and integrates social media with robotics to also fit the habits of today's younger generations. This program culminates in delivering fully autonomous, low-cost proof-of-concept household robots to three gender-based-analysis (SGBA+) populations: older adults with loneliness, minority 60+ers with loneliness and lonely young adults, as part of a longitudinal controlled experiment.

在65岁以上的加拿大人中，有40%的人感到孤独，尤其是代表性不足的老年人。到2025年，这将意味着1600万加拿大人。语音助手和辅助机器人是一种新兴的家庭医疗技术（预计到2030年将达到260亿美元）。我们与这些助手的互动目前仅限于关于功能性任务的简短对话。“Tether”是一项研究，旨在建立辅助机器人社交媒体对话技术，以减少孤独感。为此，Tether开发了云计算、语音和机器人软硬件，通过将老年人与社交媒体内容联系起来，减轻孤独感和社交孤立感。我的主要目标是创造低成本、扬声器大小的机器人，让它们像我们一样说话，而不是让我们像机器人一样说话，以减轻孤独感。与其让机器人使用不支持长期互动的重复脚本，我建议使用社交媒体来实现与个人相关的、灵活的、持续的、多响应的对话，而不需要重复的问答。社交媒体可以提供有关人际关系和对话主题的骨干数据，这样这些系统就可以直接谈论我们生活中的人——这与最近对话代理谈论功能性任务（如播放音乐）的趋势形成鲜明对比。因此，Tether的目标是一个集成的系统架构和协议，用于构建社交媒体辅助机器人，这些机器人采用感知、推理和人工智能，同时解决孤独感。我将使用麦克风阵列和人机交互数据来对用户活动进行分类，并检测两种类型的孤独。我建议开发一个自然随意对话的对话系统，使用混合推荐引擎和专家模型来选择向孤独的人展示哪些社交媒体信息，然后使用人类随意对话的机器学习和奖励新奇的相互信息模型来决定如何说。此外，鉴于社会对老年人与机器人成为“朋友”的担忧，我的研究项目通过制造具有社会调解作用的智能机器人来平衡这一点。该技术的社会目标是学习如何自然地调解社会数据，将人们与他们的社区联系起来。今天，重要的是人们能够控制自己的社交生活和如何使用技术。因此，这个项目在机器人开发过程中直接涉及到来自弱势群体的孤独公民，并将社交媒体与机器人技术相结合，也符合当今年轻一代的习惯。作为纵向控制实验的一部分，该项目最终向三个基于性别的分析人群（SGBA+）提供了完全自主的、低成本的概念验证家用机器人：孤独的老年人、孤独的60岁以上的少数民族和孤独的年轻人。