Abstract
AbstractA new stream of research and development responds to changes in life expectancy across the world. It includes technologies which enhance well-being of individuals, specifically for older people. The ACCOMPANY project focuses on home companion technologies and issues surrounding technology development for assistive purposes. The project responds to some overlooked aspects of technology design, divided into multiple areas such as empathic and social human-robot interaction, robot learning and memory visualisation, and monitoring persons’ activities at home. To bring these aspects together, a dedicated task is identified to ensure technological integration of these multiple approaches on an existing robotic platform, Care-O-Bot®3 in the context of a smart-home environment utilising a multitude of sensor arrays. Formative and summative evaluation cycles are then used to assess the emerging prototype towards identifying acceptable behaviours and roles for the robot, for example role as a butler or a trainer, while also comparing user requirements to achieved progress. In a novel approach, the project considers ethical concerns and by highlighting principles such as autonomy, independence, enablement, safety and privacy, it embarks on providing a discussion medium where user views on these principles and the existing tension between some of these principles, for example tension between privacy and autonomy over safety, can be captured and considered in design cycles and throughout project developments.
Highlights
Because our finding indicate that people may hold stereotypical expectations of behaviours for particular task-contexts, we will carry out further studies to understand which behaviours are deemed most appropriate and acceptable for ACCOMPANY robot roles
The methodology developed is based on a multi-criteria grid that will take into account issues related to all the evaluation domains: acceptability, ethics, usages, effectiveness compared to the functionalities defined as well as the economic model
This article presented a multitude of development areas, from user needs elicitation to development of technologies in multiple fronts such as empathic behaviour, learning and memory and person/activity recognition
Summary
There have been many national, European and International projects concerning the issue of care and assistance for older age. Noting that projects listed here are not the only projects targeting this area, and highlighting their increasing number points to the importance and complexity of the topic of care and assistance. Differentiating between these ongoing or finished projects is out of the scope of this paper, we aim to focus on the ACCOMPANY project objectives and approaches chosen to achieve those objectives.
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