Abstract
This paper describes the objectives and the state of implementation of the ROREAS project which aims at developing a socially assistive robot coach for walking and orientation training of stroke patients in the clinical rehabilitation. The robot coach is to autonomously accompany the patients during their exercises practicing their mobility skills. This requires strongly user-centered, polite and attentive social navigation and interaction abilities that can motivate the patients to start, continue, and regularly repeat their self-training. The paper gives an overview of the training scenario and describes the constraints and requirements arising from the scenario and the operational environment. Moreover, it presents the mobile robot ROREAS and gives an overview of the robot’s system architecture and the required human- and situation-aware navigation and interaction skills. Finally, it describes our three-stage approach in conducting function and user tests in the clinical environment: pre-tests with technical staff, followed by function tests with clinical staff and user trials with volunteers from the group of stroke patients, and presents the results of these tests conducted so far.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank their partners of the ROREAS research consortium for their trustful cooperation allowing them to do robotics and HRI research in a challenging real-world scenario and environment, the “m&i Fachklinik” Rehabilitation Center Bad Liebenstein, the SIBIS Institute for Social Research in Berlin, and the health insurance fund Barmer GEK Wuppertal.
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All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Funding
This work has received funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to the project ROREAS (Grant Agreement No. 16SV6133).
Ethical Approval
All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008 (5).
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Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study. Additional informed consent was obtained from all patients for which identifying information is included in this article.
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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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Gross, HM., Scheidig, A., Debes, K. et al. ROREAS: robot coach for walking and orientation training in clinical post-stroke rehabilitation—prototype implementation and evaluation in field trials. Auton Robot 41, 679–698 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-016-9552-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-016-9552-6