Social-Companion Robotics: experiences with end-users Wednesday 28/09/2011, 9.00 – 10.30 The European Research in Ambient Assisted Living is moving towards the integration of service robotics into smart home environments to provide support for the older and impaired persons living at home independently. The research in this area has to meet the challenges of user-centred prioritisation of system affordances through co-design of usability features that best support the targeted user-system relationship. Such research has to arrive at socio-technically acceptable and persona-adaptive systems that can be easily re-adapted and re-trained to remain both affordable, and, responsive to the users’ changing needs.
The design of such advanced systems for enhanced quality-of-experience, irrespective of whether they may be specifically intended as assistive-rehabilitative systems or for enhanced empowerment and comfort of all types of users, demands a dynamic usability modelling approach (e.g. UI-REF) to ensure that user-led dynamic prioritisation of system functionalities is guaranteed by co-design.
Ultimately the objective has to be to deliver a spectrum of solutions within a framework architecture for graceful semantic integration of the intelligent sub-systems that need to cooperate seamlessly to provide for care-and-comfort support of the user. Accordingly, to address the above Companion Robotics innovation challenges; this workshop comprises contributions from a number of thematically clustered EU FP7 AAL projects namely CompanionAble, MobiServ, Domeo, KSERA, and other related projects which will together present their insights arising from trialing and evaluation with real end-users of this class of highly personalised ambient–assistive robotics systems.
This workshop is led by the CompanionAble Consortium and includes researchers, expert practitioners and users to explore multi-disciplinary viewpoints on the challenges of co-designing social robots and their societal diffusion models -involving all the stakeholders and end-users: the care-recipients, the(family) carers and the healthcare professionals.
In addition to the presentation of the results of usability evaluations of the social robotic systems that will be presented by the participants, parallel demonstrations of these systems are also planned to take place at the AAL Forum in Lecce 2011.
The programme for this workshop is as set out below; within the time constraints of this session, there will be a Q&A session facilitated by discussants/panel of practitioners; however the organisers will be available at the demonstration site of the Hector CompanionAble Environment as well as the other demo sites to provide additional information. 3 min
| Introduction by chairman, Professor Atta Badii
| 15 min
| Usability Features prioritisation guided by the User-Intimate Requirements Hierarchy Resolution Framework (UI-REF) for Companion-Social Robotics Co-design Atta Badii, Daniel Thiemert | 15 min
| Integrated CompanionAble Architectures as Ambient Context-aware Assistive Partners - Claire Huijnen , Atta Badii, Daniel Thiemert | 15 min
| KSERA Project: Smart Robots, Smart Homes and Care for Older Persons Project - Raymond Cuijpers | 15 min
| DOMEO, Domestic Robot For Elderly Assistance. First Results and Perspectives - Vincent Dupourque | 15 min
| Pro-active Life-style Support Integrating Smart Homes and Advanced Social Robotics - Herjan van den Heuvel, Claire Huijnen, Atta Badii
| 12 min
| Q&A / discussion – facilitator: Daniel Thiemert |
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