The use of robots for augmentative manipulation during play activities among children with motor impairment: a scoping review.

PURPOSE: To describe the extent, type, and quality of studies involving robots for augmentative manipulation during play by children with severe motor impairments (CwSMI), and to explore how they influenced children's cognitive skills and engagement. METHODS: Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed & EBSCO were systematically searched for articles published until March 2021, that reported cognitive skills and/or engagement outcomes from interventions involving the use of robots in play activities, where participants included CwSMI, and full-text was available. Data extracted comprised characteristics of participants, study design, purpose of the study, outcomes assessed, collection methods, and intervention carried out (robot-environment interaction and robot used). RESULTS: Eight mobile robots and five robotic arms were reported in the 17 included and reviewed articles. Most of them informed a positive impact on CwSMI's cognitive skills and/or engagement. However, the studies scored poorly on a five-criteria quality assessment, and only one single-case design proved strong evidence of treatment. None of the analysed interventions was an evidence-based practice. CONCLUSION: The use of manipulative robots during play activities may have a positive impact on the CwSMI's cognitive skills and engagement in activities. However, further studies with higher internal and external validity are needed to support stronger evidence.Implications for rehabilitationThe use of robots for augmentative manipulation during play activities may have a positive influence on the cognitive functions and the engagement in activities of children with severe motor impairments.Through manipulative robots, this population could be able to show the abilities that are hidden due to their motor impairments, and subsequently, receive educational and physical training more aligned with their real capacities and potential.

A Context-Aware Application to Increase Elderly Users Compliance with Physical Rehabilitation Exercises at Home via Animatronic Biofeedback.

Biofeedback from physical rehabilitation exercises has proved to lead to faster recovery, better outcomes, and increased patient motivation. In addition, it allows the physical rehabilitation processes carried out at the clinic to be complemented with exercises performed at home. However, currently existing approaches rely mostly on audio and visual reinforcement cues, usually presented to the user on a computer screen or a mobile phone interface. Some users, such as elderly people, can experience difficulties to use and understand these interfaces, leading to non-compliance with the rehabilitation exercises. To overcome this barrier, latest biosignal technologies can be used to enhance the efficacy of the biofeedback, decreasing the complexity of the user interface. In this paper we propose and validate a context-aware framework for the use of animatronic biofeedback, as a way of potentially increasing the compliance of elderly users with physical rehabilitation exercises performed at home. In the scope of our work, animatronic biofeedback entails the use of pre-programmed actions on a robot that are triggered in response to certain changes detected in the users biomechanical or electrophysiological signals. We use electromyographic and accelerometer signals, collected in real time, to monitor the performance of the user while executing the exercises, and a mobile robot to provide animatronic reinforcement cues associated with their correct or incorrect execution. A context-aware application running on a smartphone aggregates the sensor data and controls the animatronic feedback. The acceptability of the animatronic biofeedback has been tested on a set of volunteer elderly users, and results suggest that the participants found the animatronic feedback engaging and of added value.

Tool independence for the Web Accessibility Quantitative Metric.

The Web Accessibility Quantitative Metric (WAQM) aims at accurately measuring the accessibility of web pages. One of the main features of WAQM among others is that it is evaluation tool independent for ranking and accessibility monitoring scenarios. This article proposes a method to attain evaluation tool independence for all foreseeable scenarios. After demonstrating that homepages have a more similar error profile than any other web page in a given web site, 15 homepages were measured with 10,000 different values of WAQM parameters using EvalAccess and LIFT, two automatic evaluation tools for accessibility. A similar procedure was followed with random pages and with several test files obtaining several tuples that minimise the difference between both tools. One thousand four hundred forty-nine web pages from 15 web sites were measured with these tuples and those values that minimised the difference between the tools were selected. Once the WAQM was tuned, the accessibility of 15 web sites was measured with two metrics for web sites, concluding that even if similar values can be produced, obtaining the same scores is undesirable since evaluation tools behave in a different way.