Personal Robotic Assistants For The Elderly
Funded by: National
Science Foundation
Amount : $1.4M
Dr. Jackie Dunbar-Jacob
Prof. Don Chiarulli
Prof. Martha Pollack
"This project is a joint effort between the Computer Science and the Nursing department at the University of Pittsburgh, research groups at CMU and research groups at the University of Michigan. The project is focused on the development of information technology to assist the growing elderly population of the United States. Our goal is to provide technology that will enable the elderly to remain living in their homes for as long as possible. Specifically, we are designing and building a personal mobile robotic assistant for the monitoring and guidance of the daily activities of an elderly person.
The research will advance the state-of-the-art in several areas of IT. Advances such as the development of advanced techniques for flexibly reasoning about plans and monitoring their execution, the development of statistical algorithms for learning models of people's daily activities, the design and evaluation of self-tailoring multi-modal interfaces that enable elderly people to interact easily with the robotic assistant, and the development of new sensor modalities to meet the needs of a mobile robot in an elder's home.
The research team is multi-university and interdisciplinary, comprising experts in the fields of computer science, robotics, human-computer interaction, and health care.
The project also includes a strong education focus in that it seeks to provide a unique forum for training undergraduate and graduate students in issues related to IT for the elderly."