Ruth Palan Lopez

2papers

2 Papers

10.0ROApr 1
An Edge-Host-Cloud Architecture for Robot-Agnostic, Caregiver-in-the-Loop Personalized Cognitive Exercise: Multi-Site Deployment in Dementia Care

Wenzheng Zhao, Ruth Palan Lopez, Shu Fen Wung et al.

We present Speaking Memories, a distributed, stakeholder-in-the-loop robotic interaction platform for personalized cognitive exercise support. Rather than a single robot-centric system, Speaking Memories is designed as a generalizable robotics architecture that integrates caregiver-authored knowledge, local edge intelligence, and embodied robotic agents into a unified socio-technical loop. The platform fuses auditory, visual, and textual signals to enable emotion-aware, personalized dialogue, while decoupling multimodal perception and reasoning from robot-specific hardware through a local edge interaction server. This design achieves low-latency, privacy-preserving operation and supports scalable deployment across heterogeneous robotic embodiments. Caregivers and family members contribute structured biographical knowledge via a secure cloud portal, which conditions downstream dialogue policies and enables longitudinal personalization across interaction sessions. Beyond real-time interaction, the system incorporates an automated multimodal evaluation layer that continuously analyzes user responses, affective cues, and engagement patterns, producing structured interaction metrics at scale. These metrics support systematic assessment of interaction quality, enable data-driven model fine-tuning, and lay the foundation for future clinician- and caregiver-informed personalization and intervention planning. We evaluate the platform through real-world deployments, measuring end-to-end latency, dialogue coherence, interaction stability, and stakeholder-reported usability and engagement. Results demonstrate sub-6-second response latency, robust multimodal synchronization, and consistently positive feedback from both participants and caregivers. Furthermore, subsets of the dataset can be shared upon request, subject to participant consent and IRB constraints.

ROApr 26, 2021
Assessing the Acceptability of a Humanoid Robot for Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementia Care Using an Online Survey

Fengpei Yuan, Joel G. Anderson, Tami Wyatt et al.

In this work, an online survey was used to understand the acceptability of humanoid robots and users' needs in using these robots to assist with care among people with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD), their family caregivers, health care professionals, and the general public. From November 12, 2020 to March 13, 2021, a total of 631 complete responses were collected, including 80 responses from people with mild cognitive impairment or ADRD, 245 responses from caregivers and health care professionals, and 306 responses from the general public. Overall, people with ADRD, caregivers, and the general public showed positive attitudes towards using the robot to assist with care for people with ADRD. The top three functions of robots required by the group of people with ADRD were reminders to take medicine, emergency call service, and helping contact medical services. Additional comments, suggestions, and concerns provided by caregivers and the general public are also discussed.