SCIENTIFIC AND GENERAL PUBLICATIONS OF ACCRA PROJECT

Le projet ACCRA a pour but de développer une offre robotique de services dédiées aux seniors en perte d’autonomie. Read more…

In line with the successful aging models, a preliminary qualitative study with phenomenological interviews was implemented with 40 elderly individuals and caregivers. Complementary results from 8 cocreation meetings allowed us to prioritize the robotic functionalities to be improved and determine the added value of robots in comparison with those of other IT solutions. An experimentation has been launched and is still ongoing with a domestic social robot with elderly. In this paper, we highlight the specific role that robots can play in facilitating aging adjustment strategies. Read more…

The cloud robotics paradigm aims at enhancing the abilities of robots by using cloud services, but it still poses several challenges in the research community. Most of the current literature focuses on how to enrich specific robotic capabilities, overlooking how to effectively establish communication between the two fields. Our work proposes a “plug-and-play” solution to bridge the communication gap between cloud and robotic applications. The proposed solution is designed based on the mature WebSocket technology and it can be extended to any ROS-based robotic platform. Read more…

Thanks to recent technological improvements that enable novel applications beyond the industrial context, there is growing interest in the use of robots in everyday life situations. To improve the acceptability of personal service robots, they should seamlessly interact with the users, understand their social signals and cues and respond appropriately. In this context, a few proposals were presented to make robots and humans navigate together naturally without explicit user control, but no final solution has been achieved yet. To make an advance toward this end, this paper proposes the use of wearable Inertial Measurement Units to improve the interaction between human and robot while walking together without physical links and with no restriction on the relative position between the human and the robot. We built a prototype system, experimented with 19 human participants in two different tasks, to provide real-time evaluation of gait parameters for a mobile robot moving together with a human, and studied the feasibility and the perceived usability by the participants.
The results show the feasibility of the system, which obtained positive feedback from the users, giving valuable information for the development of a natural interaction system where the robot perceives human movements by means of wearable sensors. Read more…

L’objectif de ce papier est d’étudier les bénéfices perçus des robots en termes de Bien Vieillir pour les personnes âgées en perte d’autonomie. Design de recherche à travers d’une étude phénoménologique, menée dans le cadre d’une démarche de co-création, une analyse des besoins est réalisée afin de pouvoir transposer les besoins exprimés en fonctions robotiques. Les résultats obtenus permettent de hiérarchiser les priorités en termes de fonctions robotiques à implémenter et d’orienter de façon plus générale le développement technologique des solutions à mettre en oeuvrepar la mise en place de réunions de co-création. Read more…

Future smart agents, like robots, should produce personalized behaviours based on user emotions and moods to fit more in ordinary users’ activities. Besides, the emotions are also linked to human cognitive systems, thus their monitoring could be extremely useful in the case of neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer. Literature works propose the use of music tracks and videos to stimulate emotions, and cameras to recorder the evoked reactions in human beings. However, these approaches may not be effective in everyday life, due to camera obstructions and different types of stimulation which can be related also with the interaction with other human beings. In this work, we investigate the Electrocardiogram, the ElectroDermal Activity and the Brain Activity signals as main informative channels, acquired through a wireless wearable sensor network. An experimental methodology was built to induce three different emotional states through social interaction. Collected data were classified with three supervised machine learning approaches with different kernels (Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree and k-nearest neighbour) considering the valence dimension and a combination of valence and arousal dimension evoked during the interaction. 34 healthy young participants were involved in the study and a total of 239 instances were analyzed. The supervised algorithms achieve an accuracy of 0.877 in the best case. Read more…

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to study the perceived benefits of robots in terms of Aging Well for the elderly with loss of autonomy. Through a qualitative study, conducted as part of a co-creation process, a needs analysis is carried out in order to translate the needs expressed into robotic functions. The results make it possible to prioritize the functionalities to be implemented and to guide more generally the technological development of robotic solutions by setting up co-creation meetings. The approach did not take into account the barriers to adoption and possible aspects of destroying value for all stakeholders involved. These could be overcome by defining appropriate services management for the elderly as part of the implementation of a successful ageing marketing. Read more…

Jusqu’à quel point les personnes âgées sont-elles prêtes à se faire accompagner par des robots dans leur vie quotidienne? Tel est le sujet d’unprogramme de recherche financé par la CommissionEuropéenne,au cours duquel plus de mille seniors, en France, en Italie et aux Pays-Bas, ont été interrogés. Objectifs: développer des robots pour les personnes âgéesen perte d’autonomie, tester leur degré d’acceptabilité, et le prix qu’elles seraient prêtes à payer pour les avoir à leurs côté. Read more…

In line with the successful aging models, a preliminary qualitative study withphenomenological interviews was implemented with 40 elderly individuals and caregivers. Complementary results from 8 cocreation meetings allowed us to prioritize the robotic functionalities to be improved and determine the real added value of robots in comparison with those of other IT solutions.

Read more…

In line with the successful aging models, a preliminary qualitative study with phenomenological interviews was implemented with 40 elderly individuals and caregivers. Complementary results from 8 cocreation meetings allowed us to prioritize the robotic functionalities to be improved and determine the added value of robots in comparison with those of other IT solutions.In particular, wehighlight the role that robots can play in facilitating aging adjustment strategies. Read more…

In the near future robots will permeate our daily life empowering human beings in several activities of daily living. Particular, service robots could actively support indoor mobility tasks thus to enhance the independent living of citizens. They should be able to provide tailored services to citizens to achieve higher physical human-robot interaction. Too often service robots were designed without taking into account end-users functional requirements, which can change with age and geriatric syndromes. In this paper, we present a robot smart control based on machine learning strategies and adaptable to different handgrip strengths. The smart control was implemented on ASTRO robot conceived to be a companion and to support indoor mobility, among other activities. Particularly, three smart controller strategies were implemented and tested with end users from technical and user point of view. The results show promising results that underline the proposed approach was suitable for the proposed application. Read more…

Aging society is characterized by a high prevalence of sarcopenia, which is considered one of the most common health problems of the elderly population. Sarcopenia is due to the age-related loss of muscle mass and muscle strength. Recent literature findings highlight that the Tinetti Balance Assessment (TBA) scale is used to assess the sarcopenia in elderly people. In this context, this article proposes a model for sarcopenia assessment that is able to provide a quantitative assessment of TBA-gait motor parameters by means of a cloud robotics approach. The proposed system is composed of cloud resources, an assistive robot namely ASTRO and two inertial wearable sensors. Particularly, data from two inertial sensors (i.e., accelerometers and gyroscopes), placed on the patient’s feet, and data from ASTRO laser sensor (position in the environment) were analyzed and combined to propose a set of motor features correspondent to the TBA gait domains. The system was preliminarily tested at the hospital of “Fondazione Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza” in Italy. The preliminary results suggest that the extracted set of features is able to describe the motor performance. In the future, these parameters could be used to support the clinicians in the assessment of sarcopenia, to monitoring the motor parameters over time and to propose personalized care-plan. Read more…

Background
More than 70% of elderly people age 80 and older are experiencing problems in personal mobility. Assistive robotics can represent a concrete support providing also a support for caregivers, clinicians and nurses by reducing their burden.
Methods
A total of 20 older people and 34 caregivers (formal and informal) were interviewed in Italy and the Netherlands to investigate and prioritize their needs concerning the personal mobility domains and their attitudes towards assistive robots. The data were analysed from a user point of view by means of thematic content analysis by underlying recurrent topics.
Results
The results revealed four categories of needs from the perspective of the older individuals: instrumental needs, rehabilitation needs, personal safety and indoor activities of daily life. Additionally, the results underline how personal mobility issues influence different aspects of daily life. Complementarily, three categories of caregiver needs were also distinguished: instrumental needs, rehabilitation monitoring needs and checkup needs. The highest percentage of participants showed a positive expectation towards assistive robotics.
Conclusions
The results were clustered according to the robot abilities (i.e., motion, interaction, manipulation, decision support and perception abilities) as a list of functional and technical requirements that should be developed to address all the needs related to the personal mobility. Robotic developer teams that work in this context could take advantage of this research. Additionally, this work can be used as a basis for clinicians and nurses working in geriatric units to understand how the robots can support and enhance their work.

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To increase the usage of assistive robots into daily life it is important to include end-users in early development stages. This paper propose an iterative co-creative method to refine the design of an assistive robot called ASTRO. Three co-creation sessions were organized involving a total of 102 individuals. This paper presents the feedback collected and provides the results from an evaluation of the final prototype. The results underline that the robot’s design was perceived in a positive way (attractiveness and stimulation domains). Even though the co-creation results show that the function of the robot are also valued, the survey provides a more nuanced view on these aspects of robot design by showing a neutral evaluation of perspicuity, efficiency and dependability. Read more…

Within the next decades, robots will need to be able to execute a large variety of tasks autonomously in a large variety of environments. To relax the resulting programming effort, a knowledge-enabled approach to robot programming can be adopted to organize information in re-usable knowledge pieces. However, for the ease of re-use, there needs to be an agreement on the meaning of terms. A common approach is to represent these terms using ontology languages that conceptualize the respective domain. In this work, we will review projects that use ontologies to support robot autonomy. We will systematically search for projects that fulfill a set of inclusion criteria, and compare them with each other with respect to the scope of their ontology, what types of cognitive capabilities are supported by the use of ontologies, and which is their application domain. Read more…

Abstract. Nowadays, the Cloud technology permeates our daily life, spread in various services and applications used by modern instruments, such as smartphones, computer, and IoT devices. Besides, the robotic field represents one of the future emerging markets. Nevertheless, these two distinct worlds seem to be very far from each other, due to the lack of common strategies and standards.
The aim of this tutorial chapter is to provide a walkthrough to build a basic Cloud Robotics application using ROS and the FIWARE Cloud framework. At the beginning, the chapter offers step-by-step instructions to create and manage an Orion Context Broker running on a virtual machine. Then, the firos package is used to integrate the ROS topic communication using publishers and subscribers, providing a clear example. Finally, a more concrete use case is detailed, developing a Cloud Robotics application to control a ROS-based robot through the FIWARE
framework. Read more…

Robots will become part of our everyday life as helpers and companions, sharing the environment with us. Thus, robots should become social and able to naturally interact with the users. Recognizing human activities and behaviors will enhance the capabilities of the robot to plan an appropriate action and tailor the approach according to what the user is doing. Therefore, this paper addresses the problem of providing mobile robots with the ability to recognize common daily activities. The fusion of heterogeneous data gathered by multiple sensing strategies, namely wearable inertial sensors, depth camera, and location features, is proposed to improve the recognition of human activity. In particular, the proposed work aims to recognize 10 activities using data from a depth camera mounted on a mobile robot able to self-localize in the environment and from customized sensors worn on the hand. Twenty users were asked to perform the selected activities in two different relative positions between them and the robot while the robot was moving. The analysis was carried out considering different combinations of sensors to evaluate how the fusion of the different technologies improves the recognition abilities. The results show an improvement of 13% in the F-measure when different sensors are considered with respect to the use of the sensors of the robot. In particular, the system is able to recognize not only the performed activity, but also the relative position, enhancing the robot capabilities to interact with the users. Read more…

Worldwide population is getting older. The older persons want to stay independent and wish to increase their engagement in social activities to tackle loneliness, depression, and isolation. Starting from these assumptions, we developed the ACCRA project (Agile Co-Creation for Robots and Aging) with the aim to enable the development of advanced ICT Robotics-based solutions for extending active and healthy aging in daily life by defining, developing and demonstrating an agile co-creation development process.

Methods
ACCRA robotics solutions will be designed and developed to be tested in three different domains: mobility, daily life, socialization support in four countries (i.e., France, Netherlands, Italy, and Japan). The proposed approach identifies four different phases: (1) needs analysis, (2) agile co-creation, (3) experimentation, and (4) sustainability analysis. Currently, the first two phases were almost completed. For the needs phase, we have used the following recruitment criteria: (1) for mobility: age ≥ 60 years, the and presence of mobility issues assessed by Older Mobility Scale (EMS) with a score > 13; (2) for daily life: age ≥ 60 years, and the presence of difficulties engaging in housework assessed by Autonomie Gérontologie Groupes Iso-Ressources (AGGIR) with a GIR score ≥ 4; (3) for socialization support: age ≥ 60 years, and the absence or mild level of cognitive impairment assessed by Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) with a score ≥ 24.

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In recent years, autonomous robots have proven capable of solving tasks in complex environments. In particular, robot manipulations in activities of daily living (ADL) for service robots have been in wide use. However, manipulations such as loading a dishwasher or folding laundry are difficult to automate robustly. In addition, manipulations of grasping multiple objects in domestic environments present difficulty. To perform those applications better, we developed robotic systems based on shared autonomy by combining the cognitive skills of a human operator with autonomous robot behaviors. In this work, we present techniques for integration of a shared autonomy system for assistive mobile manipulation and new strategies to support users in the domestic environment. We demonstrate that the robot can grasp multiple objects with random size at known and unknown table heights. Specifically, we developed three strategies for manipulation. From experimental results, we observed that the first strategy has the highest success rate (70% for random objects) up to 70 cm table height. Two other strategies perform better for 80 cm to 100 cm table height. The success rate of the second and third strategies shows an average 63.3% and 73.3%, respectively, for grasping random objects. We also demonstrated these strategies using two intuitive interfaces, a visual interface in rviz and a voice user interface with speech recognition, which are suitable for elderly people. In addition, the robot can select strategies automatically in random scenarios, which make the robot intelligent and able to make decisions independently in the environment. We obtained interesting results showing that the robot adapts to the environmental variation automatically. After these experimental demonstrations, our robot shows the capabilities for employment in domestic environments to perform actual tasks. Read more…

In Europe, the population of older people is increasing rapidly. Many older people prefer to remain in their homes but living alone could be a risk for their safety. In this context, robotics and other emerging technologies are increasingly proposed as potential solutions to this societal concern. However, one-third of all assistive technologies are abandoned within one year of use because the end users do not accept them.

Objective:
The aim of this study is to investigate the acceptance of the Robot-Era system, which provides robotic services to permit older people to remain in their homes.

Methods:
Six robotic services were tested by 35 older users. The experiments were conducted in three different environments: private home, condominium, and outdoor sites. The appearance questionnaire was developed to collect the users’ first impressions about the Robot-Era system, whereas the acceptance was evaluated through a questionnaire developed ad hoc for Robot-Era.

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Peu investigué, le bien vieillir constitue un défi important pour le marketing. Pour y répondre, le concept de Bien Vieillir Désiré (BVD) fait référence aux objectifs psychologiques, physiques, sociaux et financiers, poursuivis dans la quête du bien vieillir. Nous en proposons un modèle de mesure bifactoriel (facteur général et facteurs spécifiques), fiable et valida dans lequel le BVD général s’accompagne de trois facteurs spécifiques, le BVD physique, le BVD social et le BVD financier. Le BVD se révèle être utile, en complément à l’âge pour expliquer la consommation dans quatre secteurs: l’e-santé, la chirurgie esthétique, les loisirs et les placements financiers. Les résultats obtenus suggèrent le développement d’un marketing du bien vieillir pour mieux concevoir et promouvoir les produits et services favorisant le bien vieillir. Read more…

Background/aim Technological solutions can support the elderly, improve their quality of life and reduce isolation and loneliness. The Euro-Japan ACCRA (Agile Co-Creation for Robots and Aging) project has the objective of building a refer-ence co-creation methodology for the development of robotic solutions for ageing. The aim of this study is to provide a pilot qualitative analysis of the real needs of elderly people and their caregivers when exposed to conversational activities with robots and to identify priority needs that should be developed from end-user perspectives.Methods A qualitative research design was adopted to define a pre-structured questionnaire that was administered to the elderly taking part in the piloting sessions. Three groups of end-users were included: subjects with an age ≥ 60years, infor-mal caregivers and formal caregivers.Results The interviews were carried out in Italy and Japan. A total of 17 elderly and 36 caregivers were recruited. Com-mon needs in the two sites were categorized into 3 groups: Communication; Emotion Detection and Safety. General robot acceptance level is good and perception is positive among participants in the pilot sites.Conclusion A positive perception of the elderly on the application of a robotic solution was found and many are the needs that could be addressed by an appropriate and careful robotic development taking into account the real needs and capabili-ties of the involved subjects. Read more…

Robots will become part of our everyday life as helpers and companions, sharing the environment with us. Thus, robots should become social and able to naturally interact with the users. Recognizing human activities and behaviors will enhance the capabilities of the robot to plan an appropriate action and tailor the approach according to what the user is doing. Therefore, this paper addresses the problem of providing mobile robots with the ability to recognize common daily activities. The fusion of heterogeneous data gathered by multiple sensing strategies, namely wearable inertial sensors, depth camera, and location features, is proposed to improve the recognition of human activity. In particular, the proposed work aims to recognize 10 activities using data from a depth camera mounted on a mobile robot able to self-localize in the environment and from customized sensors worn on the hand. Twenty users were asked to perform the selected activities in two different relative positions between them and the robot while the robot was moving. The analysis was carried out considering different combinations of sensors to evaluate how the fusion of the different technologies improves the recognition abilities. The results show an improvement of 13% in the F-measure when different sensors are considered with respect to the use of the sensors of the robot. In particular, the system is able to recognize not only the performed activity, but also the relative position, enhancing the robot capabilities to interact with the users. Read more…

Service robots have the potential to support the personal mobility of elderly population. Monitoring and measuring grasping force in older adults is an important issue both from robotic and clinical perspectives. From robot point of view, new adaptive control strategies can be implemented based on the users’ force; clinicians can monitor the changes in the grasp strength over time to evaluate abnormal conditions, which can be associated with geriatric syndromes. In this context, this work focused on the design, development and testing of a sensorized smart handle able to enhance the robotic mobility support service provided by the robot, called ASTRO. The primary goal of this paper is to design the sensorized handle according to clinical and technical specifications in terms of working range, sensitivity and clinical requirements. Then, the smart handle was tested with 19 subjects to investigate whether the system is able to detect forces correlated to the ones measured with a traditional tool. Additionally, further analysis were conducted to analyse how the forces were distributed to refine and optimize the design. The study shows meaningful results as the grasp forces measured with the smart handle and the traditional tool were significantly correlated. Read more…

Human activity recognition is an important and active field of research having a wide range of applications in numerous fields including ambient-assisted living (AL). Although most of the researches are focused on the single user, the ability to recognise two-person interactions is perhaps more important for its social implications. This study presents a two-person activity recognition system that uses skeleton data extracted from a depth camera. The human actions are encoded using a set of a few basic postures obtained with an unsupervised clustering approach. Multiclass support vector machines are used to build models on the training set, whereas the X -means algorithm is employed to dynamically find the optimal number of clusters for each sample during the classification phase. The system is evaluated on the Institute of Systems and Robotics (ISR) – University of Lincoln (UoL) and Stony Brook University (SBU). 

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Human activity recognition is an important area in computer vision, with its wide range of applications including ambient assisted living. In this paper, an activity recognition system based on skeleton data extracted from a depth camera is presented. The system makes use of machine learning techniques to classify the actions that are described with a set of a few basic postures. The training phase creates several models related to the number of clustered postures by means of a multiclass Support Vector Machine (SVM), trained with Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO). The classification phase adopts the X-means algorithm to find the optimal number of clusters dynamically. The contribution of the paper is twofold. The first aim is to perform activity recognition employing features based on a small number of informative postures, extracted independently from each activity instance; secondly, it aims to assess the minimum number of frames needed for an adequate classification. The system is evaluated on two publicly available datasets, the Cornell Activity Dataset (CAD-60) and the Telecommunication Systems Team (TST) Fall detection dataset. The number of clusters needed to model each instance ranges from two to four elements. The proposed approach reaches excellent performances using only about 4 s of input data (~100 frames) and outperforms the state of the art when it uses approximately 500 frames on the CAD-60 dataset. The results are promising for the test in real context.

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The mission of ACCRA (Agile Co-Creation for Robots and Aging) is to enable the development of advanced ICT Robotics based solutions for extending active and healthy aging in daily life by defining, developing and demonstrating an agile co-creation development process. ACCRA project consists of three robotic applications which aim to promote the independent living by means of personal mobility application, to support the daily life management thanks to housework application and to promote conversation rehabilitation tailored on personal attitude by means of dedicated software programme. Additionally, ACCRA project will be designed and developed on open source framework (i.e. ROS, FIWARE, universAAL and Rospex) to promote the interoperability among scientific community. Read more…