NRI: INT: Learning-Enabled Robot Support of Daily Activities for Successful Activity Completion

Washington State University, Pullman WA

Investigators

Abstract

The population is aging - the estimated number of individuals over the age of 85 will triple by 2050. Even in our current population an estimated 9% of adults age 65+ and 50% of adults age 85+ need assistance with everyday activities, and the annual cost for the United States is roughly $2 trillion. Given the economic and quality of life costs, there is a critical need to better use smart technologies so that individuals can live independently in their own homes, helping both individuals and society as a whole. This proposed work will create a novel multi-agent robot system, called Robotic Activity Support (RAS), that provides in-home activity support for older adults and others that need assistance to independently perform common activities of daily living. The system will rely on cooperation between a smart home and a mobile robot to learn activity routines for an individual. RAS will use this information to provide activity interventions that help smart home residents initiate and successfully complete important daily activities and improve functional independence. Rather than explore co-robot systems with multiple identical platforms, the system will represent a collaboration between a mobile robot, a smart home agent with multiple heterogeneous sensors and multiple humans with distinct roles. For this collaboration, the project team will employ a custom robot that will partner with the team's CASAS smart home architecture. RAS will incorporate caregiver-in-the-loop active learning to improve its models. the team will use an iterative user-centered development process to enhance the mobile robotic platform design. The RAS system will use active learning from both the resident and caregiver to learn common activities and how it can support such activities. For example, the robot may prompt a resident to eat breakfast if she does not initiate the task at the normal time, remind the resident where the cereal is, and notify a nearby caregiver if help is needed that is beyond the robot's capabilities. The team will evaluate RAS on historic smart home data (from their more than 100 deployments), in their on-campus smart home, and in a home with a healthy older adult caregiver, as well as an older adult exhibiting cognitive limitations.