Abstract Background After above-knee amputation, the missing biological knee and ankle are replaced with passive prosthetic devices. Passive prostheses are able to dissipate limited amounts of energy using resistive damper systems during “negative energy” tasks like sit-down. However, passive prosthetic knees are not able to provide high levels of resistance at the end of the sit-down movement when the knee is flexed, and users need the most support. Consequently, users are forced to over-compensate with their upper body, residual hip, and intact leg, and/or sit down with a ballistic and uncontrolled movement. Powered prostheses have the potential to solve this problem. Powered prosthetic joints are controlled by motors, which can produce higher levels of resistance at a larger range of joint positions than passive damper systems. Therefore, powered prostheses have the potential to make sitting down more controlled and less difficult for above-knee amputees, improving their functional mobility. Methods Ten individuals with above-knee amputations sat down using their prescribed passive prosthesis and a research powered knee-ankle prosthesis. Subjects performed three sit-downs with each prosthesis while we recorded joint angles, forces, and muscle activity from the intact quadricep muscle. Our main outcome measures were weight-bearing symmetry and muscle effort of the intact quadricep muscle. We performed paired t-tests on these outcome measures to test for significant differences between passive and powered prostheses. Results We found that the average weight-bearing symmetry improved by 42.1% when subjects sat down with the powered prosthesis compared to their passive prostheses. This difference was significant (p = 0.0012), and every subject’s weight-bearing symmetry improved when using the powered prosthesis. Although the intact quadricep muscle contraction differed in shape, neither the integral nor the peak of the signal was significantly different between conditions (integral p > 0.01, peak p > 0.01). Conclusions In this study, we found that a powered knee-ankle prosthesis significantly improved weight-bearing symmetry during sit-down compared to passive prostheses. However, we did not observe a corresponding decrease in intact-limb muscle effort. These results indicate that powered prosthetic devices have the potential to improve balance during sit-down for individuals with above-knee amputation and provide insight for future development of powered prosthetics.
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Dog Sit! Domestic Dogs (Canis familiaris) Follow a Robot's Sit Commands
As personal social robots become more prevalent, the need for the
designs of these systems to explicitly consider pets become more
apparent. However, it is not known whether dogs would interact
with a social robot. In two experiments, we investigate whether
dogs respond to a social robot after the robot called their names,
and whether dogs follow the ‘sit’ commands given by the robot.
We conducted a between-subjects study (n = 34) to compare dogs’
reactions to a social robot with a loudspeaker. Results indicate
that dogs gazed at the robot more often after the robot called their
names than after the loudspeaker called their names. Dogs followed
the ‘sit’ commands more often given by the robot than given by
the loudspeaker. The contribution of this study is that it is the
first study to provide preliminary evidence that 1) dogs showed
positive behaviors to social robots and that 2) social robots could
influence dog’s behaviors. This study enhance the understanding
of the nature of the social interactions between humans and social
robots from the evolutionary approach. Possible explanations for
the observed behavior might point toward dogs perceiving robots as
agents, the embodiment of the robot creating pressure for socialized
responses, or the multimodal (i.e., verbal and visual) cues provided
by the robot being more attractive than our control condition.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10170649
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 16 to 24
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Background The worldwide population of older adults will soon exceed the capacity of assisted living facilities. Accordingly, we aim to understand whether appropriately designed robots could help older adults stay active at home.
Methods Building on related literature as well as guidance from experts in game design, rehabilitation, and physical and occupational therapy, we developed eight human-robot exercise games for the Baxter Research Robot, six of which involve physical human-robot contact. After extensive iteration, these games were tested in an exploratory user study including 20 younger adult and 20 older adult users.
Results Only socially and physically interactive games fell in the highest ranges for pleasantness, enjoyment, engagement, cognitive challenge, and energy level. Our games successfully spanned three different physical, cognitive, and temporal challenge levels. User trust and confidence in Baxter increased significantly between pre- and post-study assessments. Older adults experienced higher exercise, energy, and engagement levels than younger adults, and women rated the robot more highly than men on several survey questions.
Conclusions The results indicate that social-physical exercise with a robot is more pleasant, enjoyable, engaging, cognitively challenging, and energetic than similar interactions that lack physical touch. In addition to this main finding, researchers working in similar areas can build on our design practices, our open-source resources, and the age-group and gender differences that we found.
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To better prepare future generations, knowledge about computers and programming are one of the many skills that are part of almost all Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematic programs; however, teaching and learning programming is a complex task that is generally considered difficult by students and teachers alike. One approach to engage and inspire students from a variety of backgrounds is the use of educational robots. Unfortunately, previous research presents mixed results on the effectiveness of educational robots on student learning. One possibility for this lack of clarity may be because students have a wide variety of styles of learning. It is possible that the use of kinesthetic feedback, in addition to the normally used visual feedback, may improve learning with educational robots by providing a richer, multi-modal experience that may appeal to a larger number of students with different learning styles. It is also possible, however, that the addition of kinesthetic feedback, and how it may interfere with the visual feedback, may decrease a student’s ability to interpret the program commands being executed by a robot, which is critical for program debugging. In this work, we investigated whether human participants were able to accurately determine a sequence of program commands performed by a robot when both kinesthetic and visual feedback were being used together. Command recall and end point location determination were compared to the typically used visual-only method, as well as a narrative description. Results from 10 sighted participants indicated that individuals were able to accurately determine a sequence of movement commands and their magnitude when using combined kinesthetic + visual feedback. Participants’ recall accuracy of program commands was actually better with kinesthetic + visual feedback than just visual feedback. Although the recall accuracy was even better with the narrative description, this was primarily due to participants confusing an absolute rotation command with a relative rotation command with the kinesthetic + visual feedback. Participants’ zone location accuracy of the end point after a command was executed was significantly better for both the kinesthetic + visual feedback and narrative methods compared to the visual-only method. Together, these results suggest that the use of both kinesthetic + visual feedback improves an individual’s ability to interpret program commands, rather than decreases it.more » « less
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In providing physical assistance to elderly people, ensuring cooperative behavior from the elderly persons is a critical requirement. In sit-to-stand assistance, for example, an older adult must lean forward, so that the body mass can shift towards the feet before a caregiver starts lifting the body. An experienced caregiver guides the older adult through verbal communications and physical interactions, so that the older adult may be cooperative throughout the process. This guidance is of paramount importance and is a major challenge in introducing a robotic aid to the eldercare environment. The wide-scope goal of the current work is to develop an in-telligent eldercare robot that can a) monitor the mental state of an older adult, and b) guide the older adult through an assisting procedure so that he/she can be cooperative in being assisted. The current work presents a basic modeling framework for describing a human's physical behaviors reflecting an internal mental state, and an algorithm for estimating the mental state through interactive observations. The sit-to-stand assistance problem is considered for the initial study. A simple Kalman Filter is constructed for estimating the level of cooperativeness in response to applied cues, with a thresholding scheme being used to make judgments on the cooperativeness state.more » « less
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Impact of Interaction Context on the Student Affect-Learning Relationship in Child-Robot InteractionPrior work in affect-aware educational robots has often relied on a common belief that the relationship between student affect and learning is independent of agent behaviors (child’s/robot’s) or unidirectional (positive/negative but not both) throughout the entire student-robot interaction.We argue that the student affect-learning relationship should be interpreted in two contexts: (1) social learning paradigm and (2) sub-events within child-robot interaction. In our paper, we examine two different social learning paradigms where children interact with a robot that acts either as a tutor or a tutee. Sub-events within child-robot interaction are defined as task-related events occurring in specific phases of an interaction (e.g., when the child/robot gets a wrong answer). We examine subevents at a macro level (entire interaction) and a micro level (within specific sub-events). In this paper, we provide an in-depth correlation analysis of children’s facial affect and vocabulary learning. We found that children’s affective displays became more predictive of their vocabulary learning when children interacted with a tutee robot who did not scaffold their learning. Additionally, children’s affect displayed during micro-level events was more predictive of their learning than during macro-level events. Last, we found that the affect-learning relationship is not unidirectional, but rather is modulated by context, i.e., several affective states facilitated student learning when displayed in some sub-events but inhibited learning when displayed in others. These findings indicate that both social learning paradigm and sub-events within interaction modulate student affect-learning relationship.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3371382.3380734
