A Low-Cost Assistive Robot for Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders to Aid in Daily Living Activities.

Roberto J. López-Sastre,Sergio Lafuente-Arroyo,Saturnino Maldonado-Bascón,Francisco Javier Acevedo-Rodríguez,Marcos Baptista-Ríos,Soraya Pacheco-da-Costa

doi:10.3390/ijerph18083974

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new low-cost robotic platform that has been explicitly developed to increase children with neurodevelopmental disorders’ involvement in the environment during everyday living activities. In order to support the children and youth with both the sequencing and learning of everyday living tasks, our robotic platform incorporates a sophisticated online action detection module that is capable of monitoring the acts performed by users. We explain all the technical details that allow many applications to be introduced to support individuals with functional diversity. We present this work as a proof of concept, which will enable an assessment of the impact that the developed technology may have on the collective of children and youth with neurodevelopmental disorders in the near future.

Highlights

As we have previously described, our low-cost robotic platform can monitor the users in a known environment, for which a map is available
With the low-cost robotic platform proposed, embedding all the AI processing in the Jetson TX2 board, this can be done at 5 frames per second, a speed similar to previously reported results [63]
All the information generated by the online action detection (OAD) module is dumped into a log file, in which all the information related to a user is stored

Summary

Introduction

Domestic life and self-care limitations are the main groups of disabilities. This situation has an important negative impact on people’s participation in different environments. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) [3] provides a common language to describe human functioning. ICF describes disabilities as deficits at the level of body structures and functions, limitations in individual functional activity and restrictions in social participation, in the context of environmental and personal factors that can interact with each other. Environmental factors include assistive technology (AT), which is any product, instrument, strategy, service or practice used by people with disabilities to prevent, compensate, relieve or neutralize an impairment, disability or handicap. AT must improve the individual’s autonomy and quality of life (QoL) [4]

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