Towards In-Home Deployments of Physically Assistive Robots: Insights from Robot-Assisted Feeding for People with Motor Impairments

Abstract

Over 1 billion people worldwide are estimated to experience significant disability, which impacts their ability to independently conduct activities of daily living (ADLs) such as eating, ambulating, and dressing. Physically assistive robots (PARs) have emerged as a promising technology to help people with disabilities conduct ADLs, thereby restoring independence and reducing caregiver burden. However, despite decades of research on PARs, deployments of them in end-users' homes are still few and far between. This thesis focuses on robot-assisted feeding as a case study for how we can achieve in-home deployments of PARs. Our ultimate goal is to develop a robot-assisted feeding system that enables any user, in any environment, to feed themselves a meal of their choice in a way that aligns with their preferences. We collaborate closely with 2 community researchers with motor impairments to design, implement, and evaluate a robot-assisted feeding system that makes progress towards this ultimate goal. Specifically, this thesis presents the following work: 1. A systematic survey of research on PARs, identifying key themes and trends;2. A formative study investigating the meal-related needs of people with motor impairments and their priorities regarding the design of robot-assisted feeding systems; 3. An action schema and unsupervised learning pipeline that uses human data to learn representative actions a robot can use acquire diverse bites of food; and 4. The key system design considerations, both software and hardware, that enabled us to develop a robot-assisted feeding system to deploy in users' homes. We evaluate the system with two studies: (1) an out-of-lab study where 5 participants and 1 community researcher use the robot to feed themselves a meal of their choice in a cafeteria, conference room, or office; and (2) a 5-day, in-home deployment where 1 community researcher uses the robot to feed himself 10 meals across various spatial, social, and activity contexts. The studies reveal promising results in terms of the usability and functionality of the system, as well as key directions for future work that are necessary to achieve the aforementioned ultimate goal. We present key lessons learned regarding in-home deployments of PARs: (1) spatial contexts are numerous, customizability lets users adapt to them; (2) off-nominals will arise, variable autonomy lets users overcome them; (3) assistive robots' benefits depend on context; and (4) work with end-users and stakeholders.