RT Dissertation/Thesis
T1 Autonomous socially assistive robotics in pediatric clinical practice
A1 Pulido Pascual, José Carlos
AB The development of new devices to support neurological recovery is a current challengefor clinical professionals and engineers [Tapus et al. 2007b]. Particularly, in the last decade,robotic applications have demonstrated their great potential as novel approaches [Dru_zbickiet al. 2013]. Socially Assistive Robotics refers to those robots that provide assistance to hu-man beings through social interaction. This technology is particularly interesting in health-care domains since it is able to elicit more favorable responses to the treatment [Okamuraet al. 2010]. All these approaches start from the same hypothesis: the interaction providedby a social robot helps patients to get engaged with the treatment, in addition to automaticdata gathering and reporting, helping to relieve the workload of healthcare professionals whilereducing the socio-economic costs.Under this context, this thesis arises from four foundations: neurorehabilitation, socially assistive robotics, gamification and artificial intelligence. The integration of thesefundamentals aims to design a child-robot interaction framework to enhance the pediatricclinical practice. The designed framework is provided with an intelligent system, so that noengineer is required either to control the interaction or to adapt the system. During thedevelopment of this thesis the framework has been used and evaluated in two di erent tasks:pediatric rehabilitation (NAOTherapist) and motion encouragement. Being the first one thecentral application of the presented work. In NAOTherapist, child-robot sessions are composed of playful immersive activities based on reward and positive reinforcement to improvemotivation and, therefore, adherence to treatments. The ultimate goal is to demonstratethe feasibility of this framework in real healthcare settings, so a user-centered prototypingis proposed by involving the user during each development phase. A prototype was initiallyevaluated with more than 120 of typically developing children, obtaining a generalized highdegree of active engagement [Pulido et al. 2017]. After that, three evaluation scenarios ex-posed the platform to the real practice: a first contact to get closer to the target individual,a long-term experience to determine personalization needs [Pulido et al. 2019], and an intensive intervention to evaluate the motivation and adherence to treatment. About 20 pediatricpatients participated in the studies with very promising results. In all cases, the sessions withthe robot provided a greater motivation compared to the conventional treatment, getting pa-ients to exceed the objectives marked by the experts. Positive reinforcement and rewardingthe patient were fundamental aspects to maintain motivation. The robot autonomy was alsoa key point, so making the robot taking its own decisions improved the perception of socialentity. The interviewed relatives detected functional and self-esteem enhancements in theirchildren, and experts confirmed the system utility and usability for application in pediatrics.
YR 2020
FD 2020-01
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/31276
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/31276
LA eng
NO Mención Internacional en el título de doctor
NO This thesis has been partially funded by the following projects: MICINN, RTI2018-099522-B-C43; MINECO, TIN2015-65686-C5-1-R; European Union Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7),Grant Agreement No. FP7-ICT-601116; MINECO, TIN2012-38079-C03-02.
DS e-Archivo
RD 1 jul. 2024