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An autonomous robotic exercise tutor for elderly people

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Abstract

Ambient assisted living proposes to utilize technological solutions to sustain the well being of elderly people. In accordance with the vision of successful aging, we describe in this study an autonomous robotic exercise tutor for elderly people. The robot learns a set of physical exercises from a human demonstrator in an imitation framework, and performs these motions in an exercise scenario, while monitoring the elderly person to provide verbal feedback. We developed an exercise program in collaboration with a nursing home, and tested our system in a real world scenario with visitors of a day care center, over multiple sessions. We provide a detailed description of the system implementation, as well as our observations for the exercise program. For the study held in the day care center, video annotations and user self-assessments are evaluated to measure the overall performance of the system and to validate our approach. The analysis revealed that elderly people can successfully exercise with the assistance of the robot, while staying engaged with the system over multiple sessions.

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Notes

  1. This paper extends our earlier work (Görer et al. 2013) with a complete feedback system, increased social capabilities, studies with elderly over multiple sessions, evaluation of communicative behavior, and evaluation of user satisfaction.

  2. This is mostly due to the fact that speech recognition tools in Turkish language are limited, compared to tools developed for English language.

  3. http://ab-initio.mit.edu/nlopt.

  4. www.aldebaran-robotics.com.

  5. http://doc.aldebaran.com/1-14/software/index.html.

  6. All questionnaires used in this study can be obtained by contacting the corresponding author.

  7. A sample session can be seen at https://youtu.be/lbLo3-oIi8o.

  8. https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/ (Wittenburg et al. 2006).

  9. We did not assess personality formally, in order to keep the setup simpler.

  10. We did not use a formalism for coding facial actions but described the expected expressions from the existing literature. Nevertheless, the annotations show high inter-annotator consistency.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Okan Aşık for his comments on this work and his help with the observational studies. We further thank İbrahim Özcan for his help with the annotations. This work is supported in part by Boğaziçi University Research Fund through project 13A01P3.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Binnur Görer, Albert Ali Salah & H. Levent Akın

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  1. Binnur Görer
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  2. Albert Ali Salah
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  3. H. Levent Akın
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Correspondence to Binnur Görer.

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This is one of several papers published in Autonomous Robots comprising the “Special Issue on Assistive and Rehabilitation Robotics”.

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Görer, B., Salah, A.A. & Akın, H.L. An autonomous robotic exercise tutor for elderly people. Auton Robot 41, 657–678 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-016-9598-5

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