A University of Texas at Arlington computer science researcher is developing a robotic system that helps individuals with spinal cord injuries perform on a regular basis tasks, and he or she’s involving members of the UTA Movin’ Mavs wheelchair basketball team in the hassle.
Fillia Makedon, a distinguished professor within the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, received a $218,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Disability and Rehabilitation Engineering (DARE) program. The project, “Collaborative Research: DARE: A Personalized Assistive Robotic System that Assesses Cognitive Fatigue in Individuals with Paralysis,” represents a collaboration with Santa Clara University Professor Maria Kyrarini, who received a similar-sized grant to seek out their research.
Assistive robots can play a big role in assisting individuals with disabilities at home, improving independence and on a regular basis quality of life. For instance, a robot may assist a person with motor impairments to perform a task resembling preparing lunch or preparing for a gathering or work. That might be an enormous plus for elderly individuals who need some assistance but aren’t ready or willing to maneuver right into a full-fledged assisted living facility.”
Fillia Makedon, Distinguished Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington
Makedon’s goal is to design a customized assistive robotic system, which she has named Intelligent Robotic Cooperation for Secure Assistance (iRCSA), that may recognize, assess and reply to an individual’s cognitive fatigue level during tasks resembling cooking. To do these human-robot collaboration (HRC) tasks, Makedon and her team will develop a multi-sensory system that collects physiological data like facial expressions from the human teammate during an HRC task. The system then applies advanced machine learning/deep learning methods to routinely assess the person’s cognitive fatigue.
“Based on the cognitive fatigue assessment, the iRCSA system will adapt the robot’s behavior in an effort to provide personalized support,” Makedon said. “We are going to develop human-robot collaboration scenarios where an individual affected by a spinal cord injury and a robot can cooperate easily to perform day by day tasks.
“For the design, development, and evaluation of iRCSA, we’ll follow the participatory motion research approach by involving within the system design students affected by spinal cord injury. UTA’s Movin Mavs basketball team will take part in the project from its early phase. Their beneficial insight and feedback might be crucial to making sure the acceptability and usefulness of the proposed system.”
Hong Jiang, Wendell H. Nedderman Endowed Professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, said Makedon’s project could greatly aid individuals with spinal cord injuries or mobility difficulties.
“Collecting and using data that might immediately be used to assist people has the chance to be life-changing,” Jiang said. “This grant supplies that essential link between data evaluation and helping people.”
Makedon, who joined UT Arlington in 2006, has received many NSF grants for research projects within the areas of human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, pervasive computing, machine learning, computational multimedia, disability computing and cognitive computing.
She currently directs the Heracleia Human-Centered Computing Laboratory, which applies advanced artificial intelligence methods to develop technologies for human behavior monitoring, risk assessment and rehabilitation. She is member of several journal editorial boards and chair of the international conference PETRA. She currently supervises a big team of doctoral students, several research undergraduates and master’s students.
Source:
University of Texas at Arlington