RECONFIGURABLE INTERACTIVITY OF PET-TYPE ROBOT

REHABILITATION SYSTEM

Toshiyuki Maeda

Department of Management Information, Hannan University

5-4-33, Amamihigashi, Matsubara, Osaka, 580-8502 JAPAN

Keywords:

Reconﬁgurable Interactivity, Pet-type Robot, Rehabilitation Engineering, Human Computer Interaction.

Abstract:

This paper addresses a pet-type robot rehabilitation system for aged people. The robot offers interactivity,

which can communicate autonomously and communicate with others using Internet-connectivity, for being a

partner. To avoid being satiated with conversation, we propose reconﬁgurable interactivity, especially focused

conversation contents. In order to watch over aged people through the Net, we have furthermore developed

auto-detection alert system for aged people by checking user logs, which is also reconﬁgurable.

1 INTRODUCTION

Recently, the rate of aged people is getting higher and

higher and, in accordance with that, welfare facilities

and tools using advanced technologies have been de-

veloped(Bolmsj et al., 1995; Clarkson et al., 2003).

Many of them are, however, for aiding persons with

manipulation disabilities, or for supporting physical

works of carers and aged people, but for mental activ-

ities. Especially in Japan, single-resident aged peo-

ple tend to be isolated with local communities, and

that may lead loneliness of those. Thus it is very im-

portant to communicate those aged people with oth-

ers on mental aspect. Pet-type robot system is one

important candidate to solve those sorts of humane

problems, and there have already been several re-

searches(Matsukawa et al., 1996; Maeda et al., 2002;

Ohkawa et al., 1998; Maeda et al., 2003), though they

are not focused enough to single resident aged peo-

ple. We here introduce a new pet-type rehabilitation

robot system which consists of pet-type robots and

the information center. Pet-type robots can treat as

an autonomous pseudo-pet, which can talk to user(s),

give information of the local communities, and watch

over them and send some information to carers at the

information center if needed. To avoid satiating with

ﬁxed conversations, we propose reconﬁgurability of

the conversation contents which compensates limited

storage space for conversation contents. The system

measures satiation of user(s) in various ways.

In this paper we explain some concept and features

of our system, and later we discuss some examina-

tion. We here have demonstrated and examined some

features of this robot system for aged people, using

some of the robots, and certiﬁed some effects of our

system.

2 CONCEPT OF PET-TYPE

ROBOT SYSTEM

Figure 1 shows the basic concept of our system. The

robot should treat as an information terminal as well

as a virtual pet for aged peoples. For realizing those

requirements, the robot is net-accessible and that fea-

ture allows the people to communicate not only with

carers, but also with relatives, acquaintances, and so

on. That is quite important for aged people, especially

self-resident, not to feel alone.

The robot has some functions, such as:

• Autonomous communication (conversation with

user(s)),

• Voice mail via information center(s),

• Voice BBS (bulletin board system) on the informa-

tion center,

• Telephone call with photo attachment,

• Image delivery for watching over, etc.

As described above, communication is very impor-

tant for our system, and so we discuss those functions

in details, in the following sections.

257

Maeda T. (2005).

RECONFIGURABLE INTERACTIVITY OF PET-TYPE ROBOT REHABILITATION SYSTEM.

In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Robotics and Automation, pages 257-262

DOI: 10.5220/0001177702570262

 SciTePress

Relievability & Reliability

Interface for

aged people

Mental care

Conversation

Button

Communication

Information Interchange

announce

Conversation robot

type terminal

Network accesibility

Pet-type

Information terminal

Figure 1: System concept.

3 COMMUNICATION

ARCHITECTURE

Figure 2 shows the network diagram of our system.

All robots, or terminals, are connected to Internet,

which means the robots are regarded as Internet-

accessible terminals. Furthermore, those treat a tele-

phone if required. In the following subsections, these

functions are described.

pet1

pet2

pet3

Internet

Information Center

family/friend/...

(mobile) phonecall

Figure 2: System network diagram.

3.1 Communication for surveillance

Each robot has a CCD camera to watch over user(s).

Images can be taken by the camera, and are sent to the

information center via Internet, which is connected

by a mobile phone. Then carers can get informations

easily for surveillance. If the user requires, the ro-

bot sends images in regular intervals, and that offers

some of continual watching, which means a sort of

lifeguard. That means, for instance, when the same

images are sent for a certain period, the carers can

get a situation such as the user may have some trou-

ble (e.g. a sudden heart attack) and then go there to

rescue.

3.2 Multi-modal interface

Speech techniques are, furthermore, used to some in-

formation exchange with the robot. That speech oper-

ation makes those people feel naturally and friendlily,

and then improves usability much.

The current robot system supports the following in-

vocation of communication;

• “Telephone button ON!”: by this speech command,

a user can take a telephone call, or catch a call.

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258

• “Tell!”: supports voice mails. At that time, a

user can choose “(normal) mails”, or “special (mes-

sages)”.

• “Bulletin board!”: opens voice BBS. In the situa-

tion, a user can designate “Answer” for followup

of others’ message, or “Question” for invocation of

new a thread (theme or topic) in the BBS.

Those are mainly for communication with others

through Internet and/or telephone networks, which

helps user(s) to communicate with relatives and

friends easily, as there are still some amount of peo-

ple, especially aged people, who are not Internet-

accessible.

3.3 Autonomous conversation

Besides networking communication, autonomous

communication is strongly required for self-resident

aged people, as the pet robot can be a partner and then

that may avoid the user from loneliness.

Autonomous communication consists of speech

recognition and speech generation. Speech media for

operations are very useful for aged people, who are

not accustomed to use computers straightforwardly.

The current version of robots can tell the user his

name, current date/time. The robot can use around

200 Japanese words, including (translated in English);

• “Good morning!”,

• “Wake up!”,

• “Bye Bye”, and so on.

If a user talk to the robot “Wake up!”, the the ro-

bot talks the greeting back to the user, and gives one

arbitrary health advice at random, which give user(s)

some feelings of “live creature”. Furthermore, for the

purpose of getting friendly, the robot can sing several

short songs.

Note that those speech is not synthesized but just

composed from parts of speech pieces, which were

previously recorded and edited from human speech.

This composed method found to be more natural to

listen to, and that leads quite important characteristics

for aged people to be easy to communicate rather than

synthesized ones.

4 HARDWARE FEATURES

4.1 Robot structure

To reinforce interactivity, including communication

with user(s), more naturally and friendlily, the robot

has some sensors and motors.

Figure 3 shows a skeleton of the robot.

Figure 3: The robot skeleton.

Those components enable the robot to behave

much more like a real (living) pet, which afford to be

more friendly and easy to contact (Gibson and Walk,

1960).

Sensors work for catching some signals of friendli-

ness, which makes the robot cheer up / down, as well

as for interrupting its action, speech, etc.

Considering necessity and sufﬁciency, the robot

has four motors; one for both ears, one for both eyes,

one for the nose, and one for the neck. Motions gener-

ates by those motors symbolize emotions of the robot,

which is essential for our object. For instance, the

head, followed by neck, can move vertically, which

imply the emotion of bowing, and horizontally, which

imply negation, or “No, not at all.”.

Figure 4 denotes motions of the robot.

4.2 System structure

Figure 5 shows one of our prototype robots.

At the moment the robot consists of two units,

stuffed toy unit and control unit, and those two are

connected by a serial line. the toy (doll) part has mo-

tors and sensors, and motion commands and sensed

signals are sent to the control unit.

To afford user(s) to use easily, or pleasantly, several

components are set as follows;

• A camera is embedded into a toy camera.

• Microphones are set at both ears.

• A speaker is set just under the mouth.

We at the moment use a laptop computer for the

control unit, and the control system (softwares) is pro-

grammed on Linux.

To and from the information center, communica-

tion, or information interchange is done through the

Internet, with TCP/IP protocol of course. Telephone

RECONFIGURABLE INTERACTIVITY OF PET-TYPE ROBOT REHABILITATION SYSTEM

259

Figure 4: The robot motion.

calls are not to use VoIP protocol, but done using fa-

cility of (stand-alone) PHS, through public telephone

network.

5 RECONFIGURABILITY OF

INTERACTION

5.1 Interface Usability

Pet-type robots should satisfy following requirements

with view of aged people’s usability:

1. They should not give a feeling of machines, or elec-

tronic equipments. For aged people, those “Hard”

equipments are very tough to touch, and that leads

not to use frequently.

2. They should be able to give some conversation with

contact and/or speech, that let user(s) be kind, or

easy to communicate.

3. They should not force user(s) to use.

Figure 5: The prototype robot.

To solve above problems, we install the following

features:

1. We designed a robot body as a stuffed toy bear.

That enables the robot to be more emotional, which

is essential for pet-type robots(Fujita, 1999).

2. We have developed speech input (recognition) and

speech output (synthesis or conjunction), and other

multi-modal interface for conversation (explained

below). Those techniques realize behavior of pets,

and also offer affordance(Gibson and Walk, 1960).

3. We designed user interface as easy and simple as

possible. For instance, a user does not need to op-

erate any mechanical equipment for telecommuni-

cation such as making a telephone call (discussed

below).

5.2 System Reconﬁguration

Figure 6 shows a diagram of reconﬁguration system.

In each robot, the storage is limited and so we

cannot install enough amount of interactivity proce-

dures at one time, especially for conversation con-

tents. In this paper we focus on conversation inter-

activity, which is essential for our rehabilitation robot

system. When user(s) use the robot more and more,

user(s) may get boring more for that reason. To avoid

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260

Server

Main Processing Unit

ContentsNet-Comm

Unit

Logger/Log checker

logging

Direction

communication

exchange

Client (Pet-type robot)

Figure 6: Reconﬁguration diagram.

satiating with robot interaction, we propose reconﬁg-

urability of Interactivity.

The system measures satiation of user(s) in various

ways;

1. The system analyzes the usual usage of the user by

active usage time at the ﬁrst time, and

2. the system checks the logs where which contents

are selected more often, and

3. if some of them are selected over a certain thresh-

old value, or one of other ad-hoc rules matches, a

trigger event occurs.

Ad-hoc rules are, for instance, “If a sentence was

invoked frequently at past, and are not used recently,

then the sentence may be boring to the user”, and so

on. With that trigger, the system reinstalls the con-

tents through the net from the server. For instance, if

a user often ask the robot to sing a song, contents of

songs are limited (at the current system only 10 songs

are involved) and the robot system exchanges songs if

all songs are sung three times at the current conﬁgu-

ration.

6 AUTO-DETECTION ALERT

SYSTEM

In order to watch over aged people apart from their

residences, automatic alert system is a very useful

function. The server has logs of usage history of each

user(s), and so system can check the frequency of the

pet-type robot. The system watches logs continually

and the alert is generated when the user has not use

the robot during a certain period, 24 hours at the cur-

rent conﬁguration.

Table 1: Questionnaire results (%)

Q V G N B

How frequently

do you think the

robot understand

you?

33.3 33.3 14.3 19.1

Do you feel the

design of the ro-

bot is good?

31.3 62.5 6.2 0

Does the robot

speak well?

33.5 43.8 22.7 0

How do you feel

by listening to

the delivered

messages from

the center ?

62.5 31.3 6.3 0

Do you feel

friendliness with

the robot?

57.1 33.3 9.6 0

Do you think you

feel lonely with-

out the robot?

23.1 53.8 15.4 7.7

7 DISCUSSION

We have examined a ﬁeld test, and targets are 73

single-resident aged people. Each person use the pet-

type robot averagely 62 days, and in that period we

have done 4 interviews and 2 questionnaires.

Table 1 presents questionnaire results, where “Q”

stands for Questions, “V” for “Very good”, “G” for

“Good”, “N” for “Not so good”, and “B” for “Bad”.

It actually shows our system can be used quite well,

though it is not complete. Especially, the item of “un-

derstanding” is not of good point which may cause

from insufﬁciency of speech recognition, and thus the

function of speech recognition and autonomous con-

versation should be improved.

Table 2 shows statistics of conversation data, de-

rived from log-messages in the center (server). The

system is used approximately each two days, which

seems to be moderate. User(s) turn on the switch

twice a day, which may causes from mail checking

on morning and evening. Conversation time is about

6 minutes, and it may be enough for get and give in-

formation.

For the auto-detection alert system, we focus 60%

of the testers who periodically uses the robot. Dur-

ing the experiment period, alerts occur almost every 6

days, all of which are not serious, or mis-alert. From

questionnaires, even though mis-alerts happen, most

of user(s) feel safe by watching over.

As for the reconﬁgurability of conversation con-

tents, we have just implemented the modules and not

enough experiments are done yet.

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261

Table 2: Usability statistics.

Item Average

Active rate (actual used

days per monitored days)

53.5%

Power-on frequency (per

day)

2.05 times

Conversation time (per

one conversation)

5 minutes 47 seconds

8 CONCLUDING REMARKS

We developed a pet-type rehabilitation robot system

including the information center, and certify some of

our system’s effect.

We need more ﬁeld tests for analyzing our system

more precisely, as we have not done enough amount

of examinations. Furthermore the contents, which

consists of conversation sets and speech programs,

should be reconsidered for the more comfortable and

pleasant interaction.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Part of this study is collaborated with Pin Change Co.,

Ltd. This study is also partially supported by Pro-

motion Conference for Industrial Innovation Project

in Welfare of Hiroshima Prefecture, Telecommuni-

cations Advanced Organization of Japan, and Re-

search Grant of Hannan University. For the ﬁeld test,

we have collaboration with Ikeda-city and Sawayaka

Kousha in Osaka Prefecture in Japan. The authors

greatly appreciate those supports and collaborations.

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