Objective To review research on social robots to help children in healthcare contexts in order to describe the current state of the literature and explore future directions for research and practice. Design Scoping review. Data sources Engineering Village, IEEE Xplore, Medline, PsycINFO and Scopus databases were searched up until 10 July 2017. Only publications written in English were considered. Identified publications were initially screened by title and abstract, and the full texts of remaining publications were then subsequently screened. Eligibility criteria Publications were included if they were journal articles, conference proceedings or conference proceedings published as monographs that described the conceptualisation, development, testing or evaluation of social robots for use with children with any mental or physical health condition or disability. Publications on autism exclusively, robots for use with children without identified health conditions, physically assistive or mechanical robots, non-physical hardware robots and surgical robots were excluded. Results Seventy-three publications were included in the review, of which 50 included user studies with a range of samples. Most were feasibility studies with small sample sizes, suggesting that the robots were generally accepted. At least 26 different robots were used, with many of these still in development. The most commonly used robot was NAO. The evidence quality was low, with only one randomised controlled trial and a limited number of experimental designs. Conclusions Social robots hold significant promise and potential to help children in healthcare contexts, but higher quality research is required with experimental designs and larger sample sizes.

https://bmjpaedsopen.bmj.com/content/bmjpo/3/1/e000371.full.pdf

Can social robots help children in healthcare contexts? A scoping review

Older adults with multiple chronic conditions often go through care transitions where they move between care facilities or providers during their treatment. These transitions are often uncoordinated and can imperil patients by omitted, duplicative, or contradictory care plans. Older adults sometimes feel overwhelmed with the new responsibility of coordinating the care plan with providers and changing their medication regimes. In response, we developed a Lesser General Public License (LGPL) open source, web-based Personal Health Application (PHA) using an iterative participatory design process that provided older adults and their caregivers the ability to manage their personal health information. In this paper, we document the PHA design process from low-fidelity prototypes to high-fidelity prototypes over the course of six user studies. Our findings establish the imperative need for interdisciplinary research and collaboration among all stakeholders to create effective PHAs. We conclude with design guidelines that encourage researchers to gradually increase functionality as users become more proficient.

Designing a Personal Health Application for Older Adults to Manage Medications: A Comprehensive Case Study

Humanoid robots as assistance or educational robots is an important research topic in the field of robotics. Especially the communication of those robots with a human operator is a complex task since more than 60% of human communication is conducted non-verbally by using facial expressions and gestures. Although several humanoid robots have been designed it is unclear how a control architecture can be developed to realize a robot with the ability to interact with humans in a natural way. This paper therefore presents a behavior-based emotional control architecture for the humanoid robot head ROMAN. The architecture is based on 3 main parts: emotions, drives and actions which interact with each other to realize the human-like behavior of the robot. The communication with the environment is realized with the help of different sensors and actuators which will also be introduced in this paper.

Emotional Architecture for the Humanoid Robot Head ROMAN

As a young and emerging field in social human–robot interaction (HRI), semantic-free utterances (SFUs) research has been receiving attention over the last decade. SFUs are an auditory interaction means for machines that allow emotion and intent expression, which are composed of vocalizations and sounds without semantic content or language dependence. Currently, SFUs are most commonly utilized in animation movies (e.g., R2-D2, WALL-E, Despicable Me), cartoons (e.g., “Teletubbies,” “Morph,” “La Linea”), and computer games (e.g., The Sims) and hold significant potential for applications in HRI. SFUs are categorized under four general types: Gibberish Speech (GS), Non-Linguistic Utterances (NLUs), Musical Utterances (MU), and Paralinguistic Utterances (PU). By introducing the concept of SFUs and bringing multiple sets of studies in social HRI that have never been analyzed jointly before, this article addresses the need for a comprehensive study of the existing literature for SFUs. It outlines the current gran...

Review of Semantic-Free Utterances in Social Human–Robot Interaction

In the realm of smart services, smart personal assistants (SPAs) have become a popular medium for value co-creation between service providers and users. The market success of SPAs is largely based on their innovative material properties, such as natural language user interfaces, machine-learning-powered request handling and service provision, and anthropomorphism. In different combinations, these properties offer users entirely new ways to intuitively and interactively achieve their goals and, thus, co-create value with service providers. But how does the nature of the SPA shape value co-creation processes? In this paper, we look through a functional affordances lens to theorize about the effects of different types of SPAs (i.e., with different combinations of material properties) on users' value co-creation processes. Specifically, we collected SPAs from research and practice by reviewing scientific literature and web resources, developed a taxonomy of SPAs' material properties, and performed a cluster analysis to group SPAs of a similar nature. We then derived 2 general and 11 cluster-specific propositions on how different material properties of SPAs can yield different affordances for value co-creation. With our work, we point out that smart services require researchers and practitioners to fundamentally rethink value co-creation as well as revise affordances theory to address the dynamic nature of smart technology as a service counterpart.

https://aisel.aisnet.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2004&context=jais

Value Co-Creation in Smart Services: A Functional Affordances Perspective on Smart Personal Assistants

The latest Hungarian text-to-speech (TTS) system developed for telephone-based applications is described. The main features are intelligible human-like voice; robust software designed for continuous running; fully automatic conversion of declarative (short and very long) sentences and questions; and real time parallel operation, running on minimum 30 channels. The concept of prosody generation and sound duration processing is introduced. Also, the development environment of Profivox is presented. The market-leader Hungarian mobile service provider applies the TTS system in an automatic e-mail reading application.

Profivox—A Hungarian Text-to-Speech System for Telecommunications Applications

http://smartlab.tmit.bme.hu/csapo/downloads/Teixeira_et_al-procedia-2014.pdf

Speech-centric Multimodal Interaction for Easy-to-access Online Services – A Personal Life Assistant for the Elderly

The practical challenge of creating a Hungarian e-mail reader has initiated our work on statistical text analysis. The starting point was statistical analysis for automatic discrimination of the language of texts. Later it was extended to automatic re-generation of diacritic signs and more detailed language structure analysis. A parallel study of three different languages-Hungarian, German and English-using text corpora of a similar size gives a possibility for the exploration of both similarities and differences. Corpora of publicly available Internet sources were used. The corpus size was the same (approximately 20 Mbytes, 2.5-3.5 million word forms) for all languages. Besides traditional corpus coverage, word length and occurrence statistics, some new features about prosodic boundaries (sentence initial and final positions, preceding and following a comma) were also computed. Among others, it was found that the coverage of corpora by the most frequent words follows a parallel logarithmic rule for all l...

/pdf/multilingual-statistical-text-analysis-zipf-s-law-and-uayezj8kj7.pdf

Multilingual statistical text analysis, Zipf's law and Hungarian speech generation

Parallel study of three very different languages - Hungarian. German and English - using text corpora of a similar size gives a possibility for the exploration of both similarities and differences. Corpora of publicly available Internet sources was used. The corpus size was the same (app. 20Mbytes, 2.5-3.5 million word forms) for all languages. Besides traditional corpus coverage, word length and occurence statistics, some new features about prosodic boundaries (sentence beginning and final positions, preceding and following a comma) were also computed. Among others, it was found, that the coverage of corpora by the most frequent words follows a parallel logarithmic rule for all languages in the 40-85% coverage range. The functions are much nearer for English and German than for Hungarian. The results can be applied in such diverse domains as predictive text input, word hyphenation, language modeling in speech recognition, corpus-based speech synthesis, etc.

Word unit based multilingual comparative analysis of text corpora.

This paper gives an overview of the design and development of an experimental restricted domain corpus-based unit selection text-to-speech (TTS) system for Hungarian The experimental system generates weather forecasts in Hungarian 5260 sentences were recorded creating a speech corpus containing 11 hours of continuous speech A Hungarian speech recognizer was applied to label speech sound boundaries Word boundaries were also marked automatically The unit selection follows a top-down hierarchical scheme using words and speech sounds as units A simple prosody model is used, based on the relative position of words within a prosodic phrase The quality of the system was compared to two earlier Hungarian TTS systems A subjective listening test was performed by 221 listeners The experimental system scored 392 on a five-point mean opinion score (MOS) scale The earlier unit concatenation TTS system scored 263, the formant synthesizer scored 124, and natural speech scored 486

/pdf/corpus-based-unit-selection-tts-for-hungarian-4abuvl2nnf.pdf

Csaba Zainkó

Papers

Profivox—A Hungarian Text-to-Speech System for Telecommunications Applications

Speech-centric Multimodal Interaction for Easy-to-access Online Services – A Personal Life Assistant for the Elderly

Multilingual statistical text analysis, Zipf's law and Hungarian speech generation

Word unit based multilingual comparative analysis of text corpora.

Corpus-Based unit selection TTS for hungarian