Haptic Intelligence Miscellaneous 2018

Exercising with Baxter: Design and Evaluation of Assistive Social-Physical Human-Robot Interaction

The worldwide population of older adults is steadily increasing and will soon exceed the capacity of assisted living facilities. Accordingly, we aim to understand whether appropriately designed robots could help older adults stay active and engaged while living at home. We developed eight human-robot exercise games for the Baxter Research Robot with the guidance of experts in game design, therapy, and rehabilitation. After extensive iteration, these games were employed in a user study that tested their viability with 20 younger and 20 older adult users. All participants were willing to enter Baxter’s workspace and physically interact with the robot. User trust and confidence in Baxter increased significantly between pre- and post-experiment assessments, and one individual from the target user population supplied us with abundant positive feedback about her experience. The preliminary results presented in this paper indicate potential for the use of two-armed human-scale robots for social-physical exercise interaction.

Author(s): Naomi T. Fitter and Mayumi Mohan and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker and Michelle J. Johnson
Year: 2018
Month: March
Project(s):
Bibtex Type: Miscellaneous (misc)
Address: Chicago, USA
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive
How Published: Workshop paper (6 pages) presented at the HRI Workshop on Personal Robots for Exercising and Coaching
State: Published
URL: https://aiweb.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/hri2018_workshop_robot_coach/paper/PREC2018_paper_3.pdf

BibTex

@misc{Fitter18-HRIWS-Exercising,
  title = {Exercising with {B}axter: Design and Evaluation of Assistive Social-Physical Human-Robot Interaction},
  abstract = {The worldwide population of older adults is steadily increasing and will soon exceed the capacity of assisted living facilities. Accordingly, we aim to understand whether appropriately designed robots could help older adults stay active and engaged while living at home. We developed eight human-robot exercise games for the Baxter Research Robot with the guidance of experts in game design, therapy, and rehabilitation. After extensive iteration, these games were employed in a user study that tested their viability with 20 younger and 20 older adult users. All participants were willing to enter Baxter’s workspace and physically interact with the robot. User trust and confidence in Baxter increased significantly between pre- and post-experiment assessments, and one individual from the target user population supplied us with abundant positive feedback about her experience. The preliminary results presented in this paper indicate potential for the use of two-armed human-scale robots for social-physical exercise interaction.},
  howpublished = {Workshop paper (6 pages) presented at the HRI Workshop on Personal Robots for Exercising and Coaching},
  address = {Chicago, USA},
  month = mar,
  year = {2018},
  slug = {fitter18-hriws-exercising},
  author = {Fitter, Naomi T. and Mohan, Mayumi and Kuchenbecker, Katherine J. and Johnson, Michelle J.},
  url = {https://aiweb.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/hri2018_workshop_robot_coach/paper/PREC2018_paper_3.pdf},
  month_numeric = {3}
}