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Robotic smart house to assist people with movement disabilities

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Abstract

This paper introduces a new robotic smart house, Intelligent Sweet Home, developed at KAIST in Korea, which is based on several robotic agents and aims at testing advanced concepts for independent living of the elderly and people with disabilities. The work focuses on technical solutions for human-friendly assistance in motion/mobility and advanced human-machine interfaces that provide simple control of all assistive robotic systems and home-installed appliances. The smart house concept includes an intelligent bed, intelligent wheelchair, and robotic hoist for effortless transfer of the user between bed and wheelchair. The design solutions comply with most of the users’ requirements and suggestions collected by a special questionnaire survey of people with disabilities. The smart house responds to the user's commands as well as to the recognized intentions of the user. Various interfaces, based on hand gestures, voice, body movement, and posture, have been studied and tested. The paper describes the overall system structure and explains the design and functionality of some main system components.

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Acknowledgments

This work is fully supported by the SRC/ERC program of MOST/KOSEF (Grant #R11-1999-008). We would like to acknowledge various forms of help in developing Intelligent Sweet Home from Mr. Youngmin Kim and student staff in the research center.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 373-1 Guseong-dong, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 305-701, Republic of Korea

    Kwang-Hyun Park, Zeungnam Bien, Ju-Jang Lee, Byung Kook Kim, Jong-Tae Lim, Jun-Hyeong Do, Kap-Ho Seo, Chong Hui Kim & Won-Gyu Song

  2. Department of Information and Control Engineering, Kwangwoon University, 447-1 Wolgye-dong, Nowon-gu, Seoul, 139-701, Republic of Korea

    Jin-Oh Kim & Woo-Jun Lee

  3. Department of Control and Instrumentation Engineering, Seoul National University of Technology, 172 Gongreung 2-dong, Nowon-gu, Seoul, 139-743, Republic of Korea

    Heyoung Lee

  4. Cardiff & Vale NHS Trust, Rehabilitation Engineering Unit, Cardiff, CF5 2YN, UK

    Dimitar H. Stefanov

  5. Institute of Mechanics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Acad. G. Bonchev Street, Block 4, 1113, Sofia, Bulgaria

    Dimitar H. Stefanov

  6. Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, 40292, USA

    Dae-Jin Kim

  7. Department of Computer Engineering, Dongguk University, 3-26 Pil-dong, Chung-gu, Seoul, 100-715, Republic of Korea

    Jin-Woo Jung

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  1. Kwang-Hyun Park
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  2. Zeungnam Bien
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  3. Ju-Jang Lee
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  4. Byung Kook Kim
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  5. Jong-Tae Lim
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  6. Jin-Oh Kim
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  7. Heyoung Lee
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  8. Dimitar H. Stefanov
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  9. Dae-Jin Kim
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  10. Jin-Woo Jung
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  11. Jun-Hyeong Do
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  12. Kap-Ho Seo
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  13. Chong Hui Kim
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  14. Won-Gyu Song
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  15. Woo-Jun Lee
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Correspondence to Kwang-Hyun Park.

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Park, KH., Bien, Z., Lee, JJ. et al. Robotic smart house to assist people with movement disabilities. Auton Robot 22, 183–198 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-006-9012-9

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