Ikhwan's Blog

From the review of recent robotic research and application in healthcare, below are current issues and challenges being faced?

-Adaptability and adjustment via learning - for robots to provide assistance for walking or any type of motor support on a personal level, the must be able to adjust to differences between individuals, arising from different combinations of disability and deterioration.
Robot should be capable of adjusting to the patient's walking speed, hearing and speaking abilities for voice commands, health status in case of emergency and possibly the need for water halfway to his/her destination or for visit to the toilet.

-Social intelligence - the goal of service robotics, especially healthcare robotics, is not to replace nurses or other medical workers but to enhance, assist and cooperate with human users. This requirement stresses the importance of interaction and communication between human and robots to successful and useful robotic assistance and applications. Social intelligence as an artificial intelligence (AI) branch has been defined as the social abilities perceived by the users when interacting with robots and has been found critical as a robotic design requirement for assistance especially in eldercare and healthcare environments.

-Multi-modal communication - as humans themselves specialize in interaction and communication in multiple modes via speech and body language, there is an increasing amount of research into building a more sophisticated interaction model to achieve better and more effective HRI.

-Decision Making - many identified robotic applications in healthcare require robots to perform for long periods of operation and service autonomously. For instance, personal robots for domestic homes have to be able to run and carry out tasks independently without any technical help. Because of the complexity of the tasks and limitation of sensors, a top level module, usually term as decision making module, is essential for basic logic reasoning, accommodation of potential sensor errors and recovery from mistakes in order to achieve the goals.