Promoting Access in a Mexican-American Museum during the Pandemic: Online Community Events and Robots.

During COVID-19, many museums closed their physical structures and transitioned their exhibits to online platforms for public digital access. As museums reopen, there remains a need for some visitors to attend exhibits and cultural events with minimal risk. This article examines an innovative hybrid platform for museum digital access-personal telerobots to co-explore museums alongside community members. The way it works is as follows: a community member remains at home and remotely logs into the museum robot. A friend/family member is physically at the museum, and once the robot is embodied by the remote user, they can walk around the museum together, talk with each other, interact with artifacts, and experience the exhibits together. Ultimately, the robot user and the visitor can both be immersed in the venue, separate yet together at the same time. This article examines the use of online community events and personal robots in a Mexican-American history, art, and culture museum for cultural exhibits and how these technologies may facilitate the way community members learn, interact, and explore museum artifacts. It also explores the need for best practices on the use of online communities and personal robot technology in museums. This work contributes observations, reflections, and curatorial considerations on both forms of digital media for inclusive museum practices.

The Power of Robot-mediated Play: Forming Friendships and Expressing Identity.

Tele-operated collaborative robots are used by many children for academic learning. However, as child-directed play is important for social-emotional learning, it is also important to understand how robots can facilitate play. In this article, we present findings from an analysis of a national, multi-year case study, where we explore how 53 children in grades K-12 (n = 53) used robots for self-directed play activities. The contributions of this article are as follows. First, we present empirical data on novel play scenarios that remote children created using their tele-operated robots. These play scenarios emerged in five categories of play: physical, verbal, visual, extracurricular, and wished-for play. Second, we identify two unique themes that emerged from the data-robot-mediated play as a foundational support of general friendships and as a foundational support of self-expression and identity. Third, our work found that robot-mediated play provided benefits similar to in-person play. Findings from our work will inform novel robot and HRI design for tele-operated and social robots that facilitate self-directed play. Findings will also inform future interdisciplinary studies on robot-mediated play.

Reproducibility in Human-Robot Interaction: Furthering the Science of HRI.

Purpose of Review: To discuss the current state of reproducibility of research in human-robot interaction (HRI), challenges specific to the field, and recommendations for how the community can support reproducibility. Recent Findings: As in related fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and psychology, improving research reproducibility is key to the maturation of the body of scientific knowledge in the field of HRI. The ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction introduced a theme on Reproducibility of HRI to their technical program in 2020 to solicit papers presenting reproductions of prior research or artifacts supporting research reproducibility. Summary: This review provides an introduction to the topic of research reproducibility for HRI and describes the state of the art in relation to the HRI 2020 Reproducibility theme. As a highly interdisciplinary field that involves work with technological artifacts, there are unique challenges to reproducibility in HRI. Biases in research evaluation and practice contribute to challenges in supporting reproducibility, and the training of researchers could be changed to encourage research reproduction. The authors propose a number of solutions for addressing these challenges that can serve as guidelines for the HRI community and related fields.

Home-Based Cognitively Assistive Robots: Maximizing Cognitive Functioning and Maintaining Independence in Older Adults Without Dementia.

Promoting health and prolonging independence in the home is a priority for older adults, caregivers, clinicians, and society at large. Rapidly developing robotics technology provides a platform for interventions, with the fields of physically and socially assistive robots expanding in recent years. However, less attention has been paid to using robots to enhance the cognitive health of older adults. The goal of this review is to synthesize the current literature on home-based cognitively assistive robots (CAR) in older adults without dementia and to provide suggestions to improve the quality of the scientific evidence in this subfield. First, we set the stage for CAR by: a) introducing the field of robotics to improve health, b) summarizing evidence emphasizing the importance of home-based interventions for older adults, c) reviewing literature on robot acceptability in older adults, d) highlighting important ethical issues in healthcare robotics, and e) reviewing current findings on socially assistive robots, with a focus on translating findings to the CAR context. With this foundation in place, we then review the literature on CAR, identifying gaps and limitations of current evidence, and proposing future directions for research. We conclude that CAR is promising and feasible and that there is a need for more methodologically rigorous evaluations of CAR to promote prolonged home-based independence in older adults.

Contextual constraints for the design of patient-centered health IT tools.

Technologists are constantly working to improve clinical practice by developing new health information technology (Health IT) tools, yet may not always consider the context of how these tools may be used. Patient preferences can vary widely as a result of demographics, health conditions, physical limitations, and personal inclinations, with healthcare providers having to adapt clinical encounters to better suit patient needs. Health IT tools, too, need to be agile across different healthcare contexts, with each stakeholder's specific needs in mind. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and limitations associated with the design and automation of contextually sensitive devices in the healthcare environment. We target the various contexts in which health information is presented in patient-provider encounters, and discuss contextual constraints that may apply to the aforementioned situations. In addition, we present a number of suggestions for informational constraints and the design of informational tools in these settings so that patient and provider informational needs can be better met in clinical communication contexts.

Using robots to help people habituate to visible disabilities.

We explore a new way of using robots as human-human social facilitators: inter-ability communication. This refers to communication between people with disabilities and those without disabilities. We have interviewed people with head and facial movement disorders (n = 4), and, using a vision-based approach, recreated their movements on our 27 degree-of-freedom android robot. We then conducted an exploratory experiment (n = 26) to see if the robot might serve as a suitable tool to allow people to practice inter-ability interaction on a robot before doing it with a person. Our results suggest a robot may be useful in this manner. Furthermore, we have found a significant relationship between people who hold negative attitudes toward robots and negative attitudes toward people with disabilities.

Clinical recovery and circulating botulinum toxin type F in adult patient.

A 56-year-old woman in Helena, Montana, USA, who showed clinical signs of paralysis, received antitoxins to botulinum toxins A, B, and E within 24 hours; nevertheless, symptoms progressed to complete quadriplegia. On day 8, she began moving spontaneously, even though blood tests later showed botulinum toxin type F remained.