Evaluating Multimodal Interaction of Robots Assisting Older Adults

TL;DR

This paper evaluates multimodal interaction frameworks in assistive robots for older adults, emphasizing understanding, initiative, and role reversal through experiments with Baxter and NAO robots.

Contribution

It introduces a multimodal interaction framework and demonstrates its application in two experiments with different robot roles in assistive tasks.

Findings

Robots can effectively locate objects using the MIM framework.

Role reversal impacts robot performance and interaction dynamics.

Evaluation metrics help assess robot effectiveness in realistic settings.

Abstract

We outline our work on evaluating robots that assist older adults by engaging with them through multiple modalities that include physical interaction. Our thesis is that to increase the effectiveness of assistive robots: 1) robots need to understand and effect multimodal actions, 2) robots should not only react to the human, they need to take the initiative and lead the task when it is necessary. We start by briefly introducing our proposed framework for multimodal interaction and then describe two different experiments with the actual robots. In the first experiment, a Baxter robot helps a human find and locate an object using the Multimodal Interaction Manager (MIM) framework. In the second experiment, a NAO robot is used in the same task, however, the roles of the robot and the human are reversed. We discuss the evaluation methods that were used in these experiments, including different metrics employed to characterize the performance of the robot in each case. We conclude by providing our perspective on the challenges and opportunities for the evaluation of assistive robots for older adults in realistic settings.