UTA researchers want to develop assistance robots to help people with spinal cord injuries

UTA researchers want to develop assistance robots to help people with spinal cord injuries

A computer science researcher at the University of Texas at Arlington is developing a robotic system to help people with spinal cord injuries perform everyday tasks, and she's enlisting members of the UTA Movin' Mavs wheelchair basketball team in the effort.

Fillia Makedon, a distinguished professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, received a $218,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Disability and Rehabilitation Engineering (DARE) program. The project, “Collaborative Research: DARE: A Personalized Assistive Robotic System that Assesses Cognitive Fatigue in Persons with Paralysis,” represents a collaboration with Santa Clara University Professor Maria Kyrarini, who received a similar large grant to find her research.

Assistive robots can play an important role in supporting people with disabilities at home and improving independence and quality of life in everyday life. For example, a robot can help a person with motor impairments perform a task such as making lunch or getting ready for a meeting or work. This would be a huge plus for seniors who need assistance but are not ready or willing to move 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 develop a personalized assistance robot system, which she has called Intelligent Robotic Cooperation for Safe Assistance (iRCSA), that can detect, assess and respond to a person's level of cognitive fatigue during tasks such as cooking. To accomplish these human-robot collaboration (HRC) tasks, Makedon and her team will develop a multisensory system that collects physiological data such as facial expressions of the human teammate during an HRC task. The system then applies advanced machine learning/deep learning methods to automatically assess the person's cognitive fatigue.

“Based on the cognitive fatigue assessment, the iRCSA system will adjust the robot’s behavior to provide personalized assistance,” Makedon said. “We will develop human-robot collaboration scenarios in which a paraplegic person and a robot can easily work together to complete everyday tasks.

"For the design, development and evaluation of iRCSA, we will adopt a participatory action research approach by involving students suffering from spinal cord injuries in the system design. UTA's Movin Mavs basketball team will participate in the project from the beginning. Their valuable insights and feedback will be critical to ensuring the acceptance and usability 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 help people with spinal cord injuries or mobility difficulties.

“Collecting and using data that could be immediately used to help people has the power to change lives,” Jiang said. “This grant provides that important connection between data analysis and helping people.”

Makedon, who joined UT Arlington in 2006, has received many NSF grants for research projects in the areas of human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, pervasive computing, machine learning, computational multimedia, disability computing and cognitive computing.

She currently leads 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 a member of several journal editorial boards and chair of the international conference PETRA. She currently supervises a large team of doctoral students, several research students and master's students.

Source:

University of Texas at Arlington

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