Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has had a widespread effect across the globe. The major effect on health-care workers and the vulnerable populations they serve has been of particular concern. Near-complete lockdown has been a common strategy to reduce the spread of the pandemic in environments such as live-in care facilities. Robotics is a promising area of research that can assist in reducing the spread of covid-19, while also preventing the need for complete physical isolation. The research presented in this paper demonstrates a speech-controlled, self-sanitizing robot that enables the delivery of items from a visitor to a resident of a care facility. The system is automated to reduce the burden on facility staff, and it is controlled entirely through hands-free audio interaction in order to reduce transmission of the virus. We demonstrate an end-to-end delivery test, and an in-depth evaluation of the speech interface. We also recorded a speech dataset with two conditions: the talker wearing a face mask and the talker not wearing a face mask. We then used this dataset to evaluate the speech recognition system. This enabled us to test the effect of face masks on speech recognition interfaces in the context of autonomous systems.
Highlights
On March 11th, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 to be a global pandemic (Huang et al, 2020), the transmission and impact of the virus has varied tremendously across regional, racial, and socioeconomic boundaries
We describe an end-to-end robotics solution to break the physical isolation of lockdown in long-term care and similar facilities
This section begins by outlining the robotics hardware platform on which the system was demonstrated, delves into the speech recognition interface used to control the robot, and outlines the implementation of a human-robot interaction workflow using a state machine
Summary
On March 11th, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 to be a global pandemic (Huang et al, 2020), the transmission and impact of the virus has varied tremendously across regional, racial, and socioeconomic boundaries. For example in China, a study that surveyed health care workers in hospitals found that half of the employees were depressed (50.7%), close to half of them had anxiety (44.7%), over a third of them suffered from insomnia (36.1%) (Li et al, 2020), and a little under three quarter of them were facing psychological distress (Tomlin et al, 2020). This burden faced by health-care workers is compounded when those workers are responsible for the mental and physical health of aging patients.
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