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

美国老年人的数量正在大幅增加，保健费用也在大幅增加。伴随这些趋势的是照料者、护理人员和护理设施的日益短缺，以照顾我们日益增长的老年人口。支持老年人健康的技术往往局限于计算机化的监测系统，并且可能在未来的某一天，作为辅助的“人形”机器人，它们的外观和功能都与我们相似。与此同时，我们的家和家里的许多家具仍然是传统的、低技术含量的，无法适应生活的变化。为了促进独立生活，这个来自建筑设计、机器人和人为因素的研究团队探索了如何为我们的家庭配备先进功能的家具。这个项目名为home+，是一个机器人家居家具的集合，它可以很容易地适应任何传统的家庭，通过日常的家庭活动来提高行动不便和认知功能受损的个人的生活质量。本研究项目将：(1)确定老年人的需求和愿望，确定家庭+概念中最能支持独立生活的那些方面；(2)相应地设计机器人陈设；(3)测试这些家具，以确定它们彼此之间以及与使用它们的人之间的互动情况；(4)定义这些家具及其用户交互的编排；(5)评估home+如何很好地支持典型用户执行10项日常家庭任务，这些任务定义了独立生活的能力。该团队不仅将从目标人群和可能从home+中受益最多的医疗保健专业人员那里获得见解，还将从更广泛的受众那里获得见解。家庭+项目的拓展方面将在一个研讨会上达到高潮，该研讨会寻求市场和实践支持，以推进原型。大多数老年人希望在家中安享晚年。为实现这一目标，本项目将：(1)对老年人进行需求评估；(2)迭代地共同设计和可用性测试机器人家具，这些家具在与人类用户交互时能够识别、交流并部分记住对方（互操作性）；(3)定义网络人系统交互的模式语言；(4)通过比较有和没有家+的个体在10项日常家务任务上的表现来评估家+的功效。借鉴分布式机器人的研究和形式化，该团队将专注于实现和评估home+的三种软件环境：(1)集中式架构，所有感官信息、处理、命令和控制都集中在一个来源；(2)分布式架构，具有局部感知、处理和控制，元素之间的交互最小；(3)是前两者的结合，在(1)的高级策略和(2)的反应性行为之间有一个专用的接口层。从理论上讲，这种方法可以被视为在传统机器人技术和智能、机器人增强的物理建筑环境之间建立一座桥梁。

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.