Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CARESSES (Culture Aware Robots and Environmental Sensor Systems for Elderly Support)

Teaser

The general objective of CARESSES is to build culturally competent robots able to re-configure their way of acting and speaking, when offering a service, to match the culture and habits of the person they are assisting. The need for cultural competence has been deeply...

Summary

The general objective of CARESSES is to build culturally competent robots able to re-configure their way of acting and speaking, when offering a service, to match the culture and habits of the person they are assisting.

The need for cultural competence has been deeply investigated in the Nursing literature. However, it has been totally neglected in Robotics: state-of-the-art robots consider only the problem of “what to do” to provide a service, and not “how to do it”. CARESSES stems from the consideration that cultural competence is crucial for health-care robots as it is for human caregivers. From the user’s perspective, a culturally appropriate behavior is key to improve acceptability; from the commercial perspective, it may open new avenues for marketing robots across different countries.

The concept of cultural competence in CARESSES can be illustrated as follows. A culturally competent robot: (i) knows general cultural characteristics, intuitively, characteristics that are shared by a group of people; (ii) it is aware that general characteristics take different forms in different individuals, thus avoiding stereotypes; and (iii) it is sensitive to cultural differences while perceiving, reasoning, and acting.

Regarding scientific research, CARESSES studies how to represent cultural knowledge, how to use cultural knowledge in sensing, planning and acting, and how to acquire it. Regarding technological development, CARESSES will not produce new physical robotic platforms. Instead, it considers three (physically identical) replicas of a commercial robot on the market (SoftBank Robotics Pepper) and integrates into them the outcome of the above scientific work, by making them culturally competent. Regarding validation, CARESSES will test the three robots, customized for three different cultures, in two test sites in EU and Japan, with a number of older persons and their informal caregivers. CARESSES will adopt a robust user-testing approach, by performing the same level of testing in EU (two different cultural groups) and in Japan (one cultural group).

To achieve its groundbreaking objective, CARESSES involves a multidisciplinary team of EU and Japanese researchers with a background in AI, Robotics, Human Robot Interaction, Transcultural Nursing, Testing and evaluations of health-care technology, and include a worldwide leading company in Robotics and a network of Nursing care homes.

Work performed

In the period 1/1/2017 – 6/30/2018 the following areas of research have been given the highest priority:

- The definition of scenarios for different cultural groups, which describe the activities to be performed by robots when interacting with older persons during daily routines, and provide the basis for all the activities below;
- The observations and video recording of real-life encounters between clients and their caregivers in the Advinia Healthcare (UK) and HISUISUI (JPN) care homes, which have been analyzed and evaluated by experts.
- The development of guidelines to determine how culturally competent robots are expected to behave in assistive scenarios. The major innovation at this stage was the development of the ADORE model, which aims at guiding the robot during its interactions with humans in such a way as to avoid stereotyping assumptions and behaviours.
- The development of the main software components that generate the motor, perceptual, cognitive and verbal robot capabilities required in the selected scenarios.
- The definition of a common software framework based on universAAL (http://www.universaal.info/) for the implementation of these software components, thus enabling for an integrated approach starting from the earliest months of the project;
- Three integration rounds to merge the software developed by the project partners in July 2017, November/December 2017, and June/July 2018, through the adoption of a unique workflow to be followed by all the partners to collaborate on the development and integration of the CARESSES software in an efficient and organized way.
- The integration of universAAL and ECHONET, enabling for communication with the smart ICT environment provided by the iHouse, a fully sensorized duplex apartment at JAIST.
- A initial discussion about the experimental and evaluation protocol to be adopted in the Advinia (UK) and HISUISUI (JPN) care homes in the second half of the project.

Dissemination and Communication activities include the organization of Special Sessions and Workshops co-located with international conferences, invited speeches, submission of scientific articles to journals and conferences; press releases and interviews on major journals, TV and Radio Channels; setup of the internet domain caressesrobot.org and the CARESSES website, Facebook Page, Twitter Account, Research Gate page; design of communication products such as the CARESSES logo, a Media Kit for the press, CARESSES animated video. Also, under the leadership of the JPN coordinator, the CARESSES consortium is preliminary investigating how culture-aware technologies can be applied as a new standard in the robotics and automation domain.

Final results

CARESSES, for the first time, introduces the concept of a culturally competent robot, and makes the first steps towards the development of computational models of robotic cultural competence, as well as their implementation and testing on a commercially available robotic platform.

International statistics report that the population of older and very old people is growing at a steady pace. Many of these older and very old people will be able to live alone with minimal support and supervision: in this scenario, culturally competent assistive robots can help fostering the independence and autonomy of older persons in many ways, by reducing the days spent in care institutions and prolonging the time spent living in their own home.

For example, by being with the person on a 24/7 basis, they could reduce the inevitable level of loneliness through conversation, personalized entertainment or connecting the person visually with a friend or member of the family. Also, assistive robots can impact on the safety and on the health of the older person through their ability to monitor environmental temperature, falls or other accidents and raise the relevant alarms. Consider unintentional falls: EU statistics as well as USA statistics report that, each year, millions of older people - those 65 and older - fall (about 35,000 deaths per year in the EU). Notably, even if one out of three older people falls each year, less than half tell their doctor. Assistive robots, even when they cannot prevent accidents, can play a key role in detecting emergencies and encouraging the person – in a culturally sensitive way - to tell the doctor or a member of the family what has happened, thus preventing the accident to happen again.

In this general scenario, CARESSES centers around the thesis that cultural competence can have a specific impact on (i) increasing acceptability by designing robots that are more sensitive to the user’s needs, customs and lifestyle, (ii) improving the quality of life of users and their caregivers, (iii) reducing caregiver burden, (iv) improving the system’s efficiency and effectiveness. Also, from a commercial perspective, (v) cultural customization can impact on global leadership in assistive robotics by overcoming the barriers to marketing robots across different countries.

Website & more info

More info: http://caressesrobot.org.