CARMEN: A Cognitively Assistive Robot for Personalized Neurorehabilitation at Home
Anya Bouzida, Alyssa Kubota, Dagoberto Cruz‐Sandoval, Elizabeth W. Twamley, Laurel D. Riek
Abstract
Cognitively assistive robots (CARs) have great potential to extend the reach of clinical interventions to the home. Due to the wide variety of cognitive abilities and rehabilitation goals, these systems must be flexible to support rapid and accurate implementation of intervention content that is grounded in existing clinical practice. To this end, we detail the system architecture of CARMEN (Cognitively Assistive Robot for Motivation and Neurorehabilitation), a flexible robot system we developed in collaboration with our key stakeholders: clinicians and people with mild cognitive impairment (PwMCI). We implemented a well-validated compensatory cognitive training (CCT) intervention on CARMEN, which it autonomously delivers to PwMCI. We deployed CARMEN in the homes of these stakeholders to evaluate and gain initial feedback on the system. We found that CARMEN gave participants confidence to use cognitive strategies in their everyday life, and participants saw opportunities for CARMEN to exhibit greater levels of autonomy or be used for other applications. Furthermore, elements of CARMEN are open source to support flexible home-deployed robots. Thus, CARMEN will enable the HRI community to deploy quality interventions to robots, ultimately increasing their accessibility and extensibility.