Mees

Week 1

In week one we were introduced to some key aspects of socio-cognitive engineering. I am very interested in the area between skepticism of robots and the value of robots regarding elderly. We created a group and we go along well, there are no difficulties in communication.

I got a first glance at the three options of robots, where I was set on the Miro-E right away.

In my opinion, the robots should not be mimicking a human, as that might feel very strange to people with dementia. Instead, when a robot is introduced that does not act in a very ‘intelligent’ way, it would be very easy for the patient to understand the robot. This has been my opinion since day one. We started working on our storyboard and we focus on keeping it small so that we can go in depth on every part.

Week 2

This week, we start with a lecture about the effects of music on people with dementia. It is very interesting that we can see the biology of dementia and how music can play a part in this. Using music in our case might be a little gimmicky, but it could still be very valuable, so that is a trade-off we will have to make. We went on with the XWiki, creating the whole foundation of our project. I worked mainly on the environment and the personas. It feels strange to create a fictional story about a person who has such a condition, but working on a solution makes it very interesting. The next day we went on the specification and I used the scenario based design to create a scenario where the robot would be implemented. We also finished the quick start.

Week 3

This week we worked further on the foundation of our case study. Once we were confident about its content we moved on to the specification. For the specification, I created the Scenario in which our robot would operate. The Miro robot will be walking with the patient, providing company and stimulating exercise. We prepared for the presentation next week and we’re quite confident about our solution. I really like doing the design of such presentations, as to me, aesthetics are very important. I simplified the storyboard to fit our presentation among other things. In my opinion, the workload has been very equal within our group.

Week 4

We started this week with our presentation, where Rick and I were doing the actual presentation. I believe it went very well, we had a clear presentation and our goal was plausible. We received some suggestions that we might implement, such as the Miro showing dog-like emotions. On Wednesday, we received our account for the MiroCloud website. Rick and I started programming. We tried using ROS but this was a little complicated to set up, so we stuck with the MiroCode. We did not get very far this week with the programming.

Week 5

This week, we asked the teacher about our implementation of Miro and it turned out that our idea was not sufficient, so we changed our concept. The new idea was that the robot would interact with the patient indoors, this made things more complicated, which is probably a good thing. We started working on a new idea, where the Miro would be able to be pet or do a little dance with pleasant sounds and “emotions”. Rick and I worked very hard on the code, while Mohamed and Clemente continued the XWiki, which was a good distribution. We finished the code at the end of the week and got to test it with the real Miro robot for an afternoon. It had some trouble driving, but when we set it on the table, it worked ok.

Week 6

This week, we thought we were going to be able to do our evaluations and be done in two days. However, the Miro we had did not do exactly what we wanted. It was unable to drive in most situations, which seemed very strange to us. After a lot of attempts and research, we found out it had something to do with its “cliff sensors”. Every dark surface it drove on, was detected as a “cliff” and it would not drive any further. We eventually found a brighter floor surface somewhere in an emergency hallway, which became our testing environment.

Week 7

This week, we were finally able to start our evaluations. In advance, we created an evaluation form with questions about the participant’s emotions such as their mood. The evaluations themselves went ok, but in the small hallway, things got a little tight for the robot. Moreover, the robot still would not properly drive forward, which may have affected the user experience. We were able to do around 10 evaluations. At the end of the week, we started working on the final presentation for the next week

Week 8

This week began with presentations, ours was on Tuesday. It went well and we received some useful feedback for the finalization of the project. We went on with the completion of the XWiki, where I created some graphical images such as the ontology. We agreed to have our work finished by next Tuesday so that we can finalize it and hand it in.