Hrishita - Self Reflection

== Week 1: Introduction to Socio-Cognitive Engineering ==

==== Human-Centred design: ====

We have to consider certain factors when designing and/or assessing a human-centred design such as the extent of usability of the system by the target users, and how effective and efficient the system is in achieving the target goal. When designing the system we should also keep in mind the context the system will be used in and should also ensure the users have a pleasant experience when using the system.

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==== Music in robot-guided activities: ====

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Why music? It evokes emotion, certain songs can trigger memories leading to reminiscence and also helps to connect people with similar music tastes. It also creates a pleasant environment for exercise.

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Talked further in detail in next week's guest lecture.

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==== Learning with Charlie: ====

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Targeted for children suffering from Type 1 diabetes and their parents and caregivers.

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The PAL system consists of a robot Charlie that kids can interact with when they visit the hospital for checkups and can also interact with them virtually via an app in which they can play games with an avatar of the robot.

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Through these games, the robot is used to inculcate a healthy lifestyle suitable for children suffering from diabetes so that they remember to take their measurements and medicines in time and are motivated to exercise regularly to regulate their blood sugar levels.

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==== Lab Activity: ====

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Formed teams and discussed a possible use case for developing a system of robot intervention for aiding a Person with Dementia (PwD).

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My team and I decided to focus on mealtime, especially during dinner when a PwD at the moderate stage of dementia suffers from confusion, anxiety and irritability due to Sundown Syndrome. We created three personas to develop our use-case scenario - Georgina (the PwD), Eleana (formal caretaker), and Sam (family member). We received positive feedback for our chosen problem scenario so we decided to conduct further research into existing literature about the use case for better understanding and consequent system design.

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== Week 2: Dementia, Memory and Music as an Intervention ==

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==== Cognitive change is natural: ====

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Change in cognitive abilities is natural with age however the change is not a decline for all kinds of cognitive abilities. Some abilities such as processing speed and memory do decline however word knowledge such as vocabulary tends to increase with age as we are exposed to more information with time.

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The rate of cognitive decline is largely dependent on an individual's lifestyle. For instance, a history of diabetes or depression, low education level, lack of exercise and balanced nutrition, smoking, etc can all contribute to a quicker cognitive decline.

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==== Cognitive reserve: ====

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The brain changes structurally and functionally with time. However, there is an inherent quality to an individual's brain, known as **Cognitive reserve** that can explain how susceptible the individual would be to functional impairment in case of some disease/accident. The more the cognitive reserve of an individual, the longer a neurological disease/accident takes to cause serious functional impairment in the brain.

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The cognitive reserve can only be increased with a **lifetime of healthy lifestyle choices** such as a better education level, proper exercise and balanced nutrition, regular cognitive engagement, etc.

==== Dementia: ====

Common symptoms: Significant decline in 1 or more cognitive domains, the decline is at a stage that it begins to interfere with the individual's daily lifestyle. The individual might also show some behavioural disturbance.

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There are pharmacological treatments available and being researched into however **they are not meant for long term, **they only **delay** the symptoms by some time.

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Other measures of interventions - aim at **maintaining** cognition and **regulating **mood; the intervention measures are to prevent the individual from feeling "more disabled" than they actually are and maintain some level of self-sufficiency and independence in their life.

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Current interventions for maintaining cognition can be split into 3 parts: Stimulation (usually in groups), Training, and Rehabilitation.

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==== Music as an intervention? ====

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The normal human brain uses various pathways/networks of the brain to perceive different aspects of music. The brain is highly engaged when perceiving music hence the great potential for using it in rehabilitation. Music is already used by everyday individuals as a mood regulator in their everyday lives, it also provides a great opportunity for social interaction, and can even get the person moving to the rhythm (potential for movement rehabilitation).

== Week 3: PAL ==

The robot intervention system PAL was aimed at teaching kids with Type 1 diabetes how to become self-sufficient in managing their blood glucose levels (T1DM). The system through games and conversations would remind the kid to check their blood glucose levels and administer their prescribed dosage of insulin regularly, look forward to their meals and exercises and overall learn to cope with T1DM.

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Through the project presentation, I was able to learn several aspects of robot intervention designs and how they can be evaluated.

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==== Collaborative Learning: ====

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The PAL system was based on the theory of collaborative learning which believes that individuals learn better when they actively interact with the information such as through knowledge exchange, sharing their experiences, etc. The educator's role in this kind of learning is to ensure that the learner's experience is within their **Zones of Proximal Development (ZPD)**, i.e the content to be learnt should be in an optimal zone where the difficulty of the content is not too high for the learner's skill level that they are left confused but it should neither be too simple for the learner's skill level that they are bored.

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In PAL they made use of collaborative learning by deploying a robot which would not only play along with the kid but the robot would also adapt the tasks in the game to the kid's learning progress. The developers believed this would motivate the kids to perform the activity as it is tailored to their capabilities and would therefore be fun for them, however, they also noted that some kids may not reach the minimum performance level that they set within the time of evaluation due their relatively long learning curve. Their evaluation results corroborated their claim, and the children chose to play with the adaptive robot more often than the non-adaptive variant. They also noticed when using the adaptive robot, individual patients converted to their personal level of learning over the evaluation period which also corroborated their second claim. In the case of the non-adaptive robot, the kids all converged to a more common learning level with a lower overall mean across the patients.

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== Week 4: First Presentation ==

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My teammate and I presented our chosen problem scenario and our plans for the robot intervention. We elaborated on our personas and the issues all our direct stakeholders are facing during Georgina (the PwD)'s mealtime. Georgina is losing interest in her meals, Sam her son feels hesitant to talk to his mother for fear of triggering her anxiety/irritability and Eleana wishes to see her patient happy. Thus we introduce an intervention wherein the robot takes the role of a storyteller and engages all the present direct stakeholders in easy-going and nostalgic conversations around the story it narrates.

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At the end of the presentation, we received some feedback and questions which we then used to improve our design for our implementation.

== Week 5: ==

== Week 6: ==

== Week 7: Evaluation ==

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== Week 8: Final Presentation ==

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