International Journal of Social Robotics - Special Issue: Social Robots for Personalized, Continuous and Adaptive Assistance
Guest Editors:
Gabriella Cortellessa, CNR-ISTC, Italy
Laura Fiorini, University of Florence, Italy
Roberta Bevilacqua, IRCCS INRCA, Italy
Alessandro Umbrico, CNR-ISTC, Italy
Rainer Wieching, University of Siegen, Germany
Description
Increased life expectancy is an achievement of modern societies in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Countries (and recently in developing Countries) thanks to the technological progress in health, living places and quality of food. An aggregate consequence of the prolongation of the life-time span is the growth of an ageing society, testified by several demographic studies. The study of the consequences of an ageing society on the future of social living had recently been considered by large world institutions (WHO, UN, EU, etc), which addressed and designed programs for social and technological development taking into account the impact of the ageing society in the future of the world. Within this framework, topics such as “prolonging independent living”, “ageing well”, active and healthy aging, or “social inclusion” are increasingly becoming more and more relevant. The incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases during ageing impose the need for innovative approaches to the assistance, including the ability of self-management, which has become an increasingly important requirement of healthcare in Europe and beyond. Being able to selfmanage one's own health requires high levels of health literacy and continuous collaboration between persons- carers and health professionals. In order for people to manage health on a long term basis, they need to be able to understand and assess health related information to make informed decisions. They need to be able to collaborate closely with health care professionals, ask the right questions and take control of their circumstances related to their health condition. Hence, innovative interventions embedded with ehealth applications are extremely important to improve the Active and Health Ageing of the population and health literacy of this population. Several initiatives all over the world took care of these aspects focusing on the problem of developing a new generation of innovative technologies to face an ageing society and its growing needs. Novel assistive solutions and technologies are indeed necessary to properly deal with the increasing demand for personalized assistance and to support users in different scenarios. Such solutions should be capable of effectively merging heterogeneous and potentially conflicting requirements coming from different stakeholders bridging the gap between health needs of users and clinical and social requirements. In this context, the increasing demand for personalized, continuous and adaptive assistance of an ageing population can be effectively addressed only through a multidisciplinary approach. The synergetic contribution of different research areas like, e.g., Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet-of-Things (IoT), Robotics and Social Science is crucial to deliver innovative and impactful results and technologies.
This special issue aims at collecting contributions from experts (scholars, researchers, Ph.D students as well as practitioners) in Artificial Intelligence and Social Robotics and other crossing disciplines involved in the development of innovative and effective researchers and technologies for the ageing society and assistance in general. The special issue will promote a multi-disciplinary view by collecting knowledge and experiences from heterogeneous disciplines and also experiences from stakeholders in order to show how efforts from technological and non-technological actors would add value to the promotion of innovative social assistive systems.
The Special issue is linked to ALTRUIST workshop http://altruist21.istc.cnr.it/ Organized at ICSR Conference: https://www.colips.org/conferences/icsr2021/wp/
How to submit your article
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Guest Editor Biographies
Gabriella Cortellessa (female) [M.S. Engineering Computer Science 2001, PhD Cognitive Psychology 2005] is a research scientist at ISTC-CNR. In 2003, she spent one year at Carnegie Mellon University working at the synthesis of user-oriented explanations within mixed-initiative solvers. Her research spans mixed-initiative problem solving, methods for evaluating intelligent systems, evaluation methods for Human Computer Interaction and Human Robot Interaction, user studies. She designed the user interaction front end of the deployed tools developed for ESA and led the WP on Dynamic User Modelling in the EU PANDORA project. She has worked in the AAL area since 2007 addressing user evaluation in the RoboCare project. She led the WP on evaluation methodology of the ExCITE project developing a long-term evaluation protocol for the telepresence robot Giraff, specifically to study its impact on the quality of life of older adults. She was Technical Manager for GiraffPlus, which developed an innovative environment integrating a telepresence robot for social interaction with sensors for physical and psychological health monitoring. She worked at SPONSOR and MAESTRO, two projects of the AAL program. She was PI for CNR in TV-AssistDEM, that aims to develop a TV-based application to monitor and cognitively stimulate people with Mild Cognitive Impairment and is currently working at Smart Sat Care, a project funded by the European Space Agency under the program "Space in response to Covid-19 outbreak". She was among the promoters of a series of workshops called SPARK (Scheduling and Planning Applications) co-located with ICAPS, the IPS workshop (Italian Workshop on Planning & Scheduling) and the AI*AAL (Artificial Intelligence for Ambient Assisted Living) held in conjunction with the AI*IA conference being co-chairs for several editions. She is also regularly in the Program Committee of international conferences including IJCAI, AAAI, ICAPS, ECAI, ICAART, AI*IA. She was Workshops Chair at ICAPS'13 and Track Chair of the Novel Applications Track at ICAPS 15&16, co-chair of the 1st and 2nd Workshop on Social Robotic Telepresence in conjunction with HRI 2011 and Ro-man 2012 and APHRODITE in conjunction with Ro-man 2020. She was Workshop chair at AI*IA 2020 and 2021.
Laura Fiorini (Female) [M.S. Biomedical Engineering 2012, Phd Biorobotics, 2016] is a postodoctoral researcher at the University of Florence, Department of Industrial Engineering, Florence, Italy. She received the M.Sc. Degree in Biomedical Engineering at University of Pisa in 2012 (full marks, cum laude). She obtained a Ph.D. in Biorobotics (full marks, cum laude) at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, in 2016 with a fellowship offered by Telecom Italia discussing a thesis entitled “Cloud Robotic Services for Assisted Living Application”. In 2015 she visited the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at University of West England (Bristol, UK). From 2016 to 2020, she was post doc researcher at the BioRobotics Institute and she collaborated at different EU and national projects such as: Robot-Era, ACCRA, CloudIA and SI-ROBOTICS. Currently, she is the coordinator of Italian pilot site of Pharaon Project. She is author of articles on ISI journals concerning the fields of social assistive robotics and wearable devices. She was a workshop chair at Ro-man 2019 and workshop chair at Ro-Man 2020. She is a guest editor of a special issue on the interational journal of social robotics and MDPI robotics, editor of informatics and review editor of Frontiers in Robotics and AI.
Roberta Bevilacqua (female), psychologist, psychotherapist, specialized in Clinical Psychology at the Bologna University, with a master in Clinical Neuropsychology at the Padua University and a four-year specialization in cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy. Research interests: technology acceptance, AI, social and rehabilitation robotics, usability, coaching, user-centred and participatory design, health and eHealth literacy. She is Principal Investigator of E-VITA (SC1-DTH-04-202) “European-Japanese Virtual Coach for Smart Ageing”, ACCESS (MYBL-2016) "Supporting digital literacy and appropriation of ICT by older people", GUARDIAN (AAL-2020) “The social robot companion to support homecare nurses”. Relevant projects: ROBOT-ERA (288899), eWare (AAL-2016-9), SIRobotics, Resilien-t (AAL-2018-11), Home4Dem (AAL-2014-7), ChefMySelf (AAL-2012-5), Happy Ageing (AAL-2008-1-113), STARS (SC1-PM-12-2016 PCP), IRHOLA (305831), SMILING (215493). She is strongly involved in the YOUSE Lab, funded by the Ministry of Health, focused on the application of social robotics, virtual reality and behavioral analysis and in the multidisciplinary group of Robotic Rehabilitation. Open trials: NCT04095338, NCT04087031, NCT04087083.
Alessandro Umbrico (male) [M.S. Engineering Computer Science 2012, Phd Computer Science and Automation, 2017] is a Fixed-Term researcher at CNR – Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (CNR-ISTC). Alessandro has spent a period as a guest PhD student at Osnabruck University investigating hybrid approaches to planning. His research topics cover the development of planning and execution techniques suitable for real-world applications. He is also interested in investigating interactions between knowledge representation and planning and, in applying plan-based control techniques in manufacturing contexts for Human-Robot Collaboration. In [2013-2015] Alessandro worked in Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems within the GECKO project (National Project on “Factories of the Future”). In [2014-2017] Alessandro worked on Human-Robot Collaboration within the FourByThree project (H2020 Factories of the Future) and he is now involved in ShareWork (H2020, FoF) for integrating semantic technologies with planning and acting techniques to foster highly adaptive robot controllers for safe human-robot collaboration. A parallel thread of his research activities concerns the design and development of ICT and AI-based technologies for health-care assistance of elderly people. In this regard, Alessandro worked in some AAL European research projects. In the AAL project EasyReach [2011-2013], that created social network services for the elderly through a common TV and an advanced remote control based on gesture, he was responsible for the design and development of the server-side architecture using standard java technology (Java EE). In the AAL project MAESTRO [2016-2019] he participated by working at the definition of a reference framework for the AAL products and producing a Taxonomy based on the ICF classification. He was recently involved in the AAL project TV-AssistDem being responsible for the implementation of the ICT back-end functionalities and he is also working at the production of the final commercial version of the TV-AssistDEM system. Now, he is also involved in the ESA project SmartSatCare being responsible for the refinement of ICT back-end functionalities developed within TV-AssistDem and their deployment through Satellite connections.
Rainer Wieching (male) holds an MSc & PhD in Exercise Physiology. He has worked for 10 years as senior research scientist at USI. During the 15 years of his professional career before that time at USI, he has headed a health care SME, being responsible for technical, medical, and scientific aspects in global pharma marketing and medical education, focusing especially on prescription drugs (cardiovascular, oncology), evidence-based medicine (clinical trials, guidelines), and medical technology (ultrasound). He has successfully participated in IT/health related national research projects in Germany (BMBF, ICT support for People with Dementia, Care Robot Communication Projects, Future of Work in Care Robotics, and the Support Project for 8 German Robotic Projects). He was the S/T coordinator of the FP7 project iStoppFalls (an ICT-based system to predict and prevent falls) and the WP leader in the H2020 project my-AHA (my Active and Healthy Ageing). He also leads international robotic projects (care assistants and robotic companions) in several projects from Germany and Japan. This includes Academic Agreements with WASEDA and TOHOKU Universities, DAAD student exchange projects from Germany and Japan, as well as a German-Japanese Science Communication Project related to the Future of Work and Participatory Design in Care Robotics. Currently he is leading the European-Japanese H2020 and MIC funded project e-VITA (EU-Japan Virtual coach for smart ageing) on the European side and is teaching at the University Participatory Design for Care Robotics and Innovation Management.