Humanoid Robot

The benefit of humanoid robots

Humanoid robots can be utilized for different purposes including improving communication skills, assisting individuals with their daily life, engaging and involving the individuals with various kinds of activities such as exercising, listening to music, or entertaining them.[1]

Which robot suits best

Our group chooses to use the Pepper Robot since the main object of our project is to use the Pepper to prevent PwDs from leaving out alone. The key idea is to use music and dialog to persuade the PwD to stay inside. There are three robots were provided to help us in achieving our main object: MiRo, Pepper, and NAO.

Miro is not suitable for this case, since Miro cannot talk like a human being, which means it can not have a conversation with PwDs using dialog. Furthermore, Miro is a dog-like robot that is too small, people with dementia can also have visual difficulties because dementia affects the parts of their brain that handle visual information coming from the eyes. This means they will have visual problems but have healthy eyes. This would lead that the Miro being easily ignored by the PwD.

Pepper is a Human-sized humanoid robot which is the highest of these three provided robots, which can make it easier to get the PWD's attention and start a conversation that persuades the PWD to stay inside. Furthermore, Pepper has a tablet on its chest which means it can provide more functions for PwDs to interact with, for example, playing the puzzle, playing the video, seeing and changing pictures, etc. These features not only make it easier for Pepper to distract PWDs' attention when they want to go out but also improve their mood when they are in a bad mood, making them more willing to stay indoors, so Pepper is the most suitable robot is our case.

NAO is a small humanoid robot that has the same kinds of functionalities as the Pepper but is a much smaller size, although it can talk like a human being, its size makes it not suitable for our goal since our main goal is to use the Robot to prevent the PwD from going out alone, the first step is to attract the PwDs' attention when they want to go out. From the perspective of PWD, NAO is too small to be easily overlooked by them. Secondly, from the perspective of NAO itself, the prototype we designed needs the face recognition and detection functions of the robot to determine whether the PWD wants to leave the room or not, So the height of the robot is very important since the robot's eyes (Cameras sensor used as the face detection and recognition) can more accurately detect the intention of the PWD to leave the room so that it can detect the PWD every time it approaches the door, and start a conversation about persuading them not to leave the room. But Nano is relatively smaller than Pepper which has a harder time recognizing PWD's intent to leave the room, so Nano isn't a good fit for our goals.

Robot Platform

Pepper can either be programmed in Interactive Robotics or Choreographe.
Programming in Interactive using its Blocks programming environment which makes user easy to use, it just connects some different action blocks, but it has limited features(no computer vision), thus you can not use face recognition or detection which makes it not suitable for our project, since we need the computer vision to detect the PwDs' intent to go out.
Using Choreographe which is Softbank's graphical programming environment makes it more flexible and more functional than the IR, it has predefined boxes written by Python which contain Dialogs, services, and powerful behaviors, such as interaction with people, dance, computer vision. You can also enrich your extra behavior with your Python code. Therefore, we chose to use the Choreographe as our programming platform to build our Prototype.

How Pepper is used

One function is using the Pepper to persuade the PwD to keep inside with suggested music according to time of the day and dialog flow,
another function is to notify the caretaker if the PwD insists to go out or wants to go out for a walk.

[1] Mordoch, Elaine & Osterreicher, Angela & Guse, Lorna & Roger, Kerstin & Thompson, Genevieve. (2012). Use of social commitment robots in the care of elderly people with dementia: A literature review. Maturitas. 74. 10.1016/j.maturitas.2012.10.015.