They may not be as warm or fuzzy or drooly, but a study conducted in nursing homes by researchers from St. Louis University has shown that a Sony AIBO is (in this case, at least) as equally effective as a real mutt named Sparky when it comes to alleviating loneliness. A group of 38 patients got weekly visits from either Sparky or the AIBO, and after 7 weeks, “both dogs provided virtually equal comfort.”

“The most surprising thing is they worked almost equally well in terms of alleviating loneliness and causing residents to form attachments,” said Dr. William Banks, a professor of geriatric medicine who worked on the study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association. “It really improves loneliness considerably… Loneliness is common in nursing homes. Robots may be very useful for people who cannot for whatever reason have access to a living dog.”

All things considered, AIBO is actually a rather primitive robotic pet… Pleo, for example, offers tactile skin, much more in the way of movement, and a real artificial personality. The key point when it comes to real versus artificial pets is that real pets take a lot of work. If you have a real pet, you know what I’m talking about. So, if there’s no significant difference between the benefits real and artificial pets in a nursing home context, an artificial pet would be much easier to deal with on a day to day basis for most people. Hooray, Pleos for everyone!

[ Reuters ] VIA [ Gearlog ]

I’m gonna try real hard to pretend that this isn’t a Keepon videospam post (not that there’s anything wrong with that), and talk a little bit about what everyone’s favorite little dancin’ squishbot is actually designed to do, since he’s more than just a pretty face. Really, he is. Keepon was created to exchange emotions with, and provide attention to, small children in a simple and comprehensive way. Although he’s programmed to track faces and dance autonomously, when working with children, Keepon is generally controlled by a remote operator. He’s capable of two primary actions: “attentive” (Keepon is “looking” at something specific) and “emotive” (rocking back and forth or bobbing up and down). The simplicity of these actions means that Keepon is very, very easy to understand, relate to, and get along with.

Keepon works at a day-care center for children with developmental delays and/or disorders. Despite his simplicity, he seems to be quite effective as an interactive diagnostic tool:

The children showed various actions in relation to Keepon. Sometimes they showed vivid facial expressions that even their parents had not seen before. They also showed prosocial actions like trying to feed Keepon, putting on a cap on its head, and kissing it. As a whole, the observations suggest the following points:

-The children with difficulty in inter-personal communication (especially, those with PDD and autism), were able to approach to Keepon with curiosity and security. This is probably because Keepon seemed to be neither a complex human nor a simple toy.

-Some of the children extended their diadic interaction with Keepon into triadic inter-personal interaction, where they tried to share the pleasure and surprise they found in Keepon with others, like their caregivers and nursing staff.

-Each child showed a different style of interaction that changed over time, which would tell us a “story” of his or her personality and developmental profile, which would not be thoroughly explained by a diagnostic label like “autism”.

Not bad for a little yellow puffball, right? More Keepon vids (the ones you really want to see) after the jump. (Read more…)

If you’re not familiar with Dean Kamen, you should be: although he’s best known for inventing the Segway, he has also invented all sorts of other robotic and medical devices, and currently runs FIRST (a robotics/engineering organization for students) as well the Deka Research & Development Corporation (he also knows a thing or two about sci-fi). Deka has been working on the “Luke” robotic prosthesis on a DARPA grant; it’s designed to be a readily available and easily customizable replacement arm “for people who want to literally strap it on and go.” Most prosthetic arms currently available are so ineffectual that amputees just give up on them, and because the market is so small (only about 6,000 are needed every year) there isn’t much financial incentive for large companies to develop an effective technology.

Thanks to a two year, $18 million DARPA grant, Deka has managed to create a modular robotic arm that’s the same size, shape, and weight as a human arm that sports 18 degrees of freedom, only 4 less than a human arm has. The arm is fully self-contained, with internal motors, batteries, and circuit boards that have been folded up to save space. The interface can either be surgical (the user controls the arm through existing nerves) or mechanical (a small joystick controls the arm and provides vibration feedback to indicate grip strength). As you can see, it’s amazingly effective when it comes to precision and dexterity:

The future of the Luke arm is, at the moment, in doubt… In order for the arm to be commercialized, it has to be approved by the FDA, which means costly clinical trials that aren’t covered by the DARPA grant. Deka needs to find some additional funding somewhere (maybe from other government sources) to complete the trials and move the arm on to a manufacturer. Now that the bulk of the R&D is more or less finished, the Luke arm could be on the market in as few as two years, if the FDA approves. The cost? Likely somewhere north of the $100,000 that current state of the art prosthetic arms go for, but for those 6,000 people every year, I can only imagine that it would be worth it.

[ Deka ] VIA [ IEEE ]

Yesterday’s robot video was kinda creepy, but this one is creepy enough that I’m going to have to label it as not safe for people who are medically squeamish, because it’s graphic and totally weird. Please, take the warning seriously (think, horror movie and potential nightmares), but it helps to keep in mind that it is 100% fiction, albeit very well done.

[ Microbia ] VIA [ Suicide Bots ]

At a medical devices conference in Boston last month, iRobot apparently had on display a prototype of an “elder care” robot named CiCi. Although iRobot has refused to comment on CiCi, they’ve at least confirmed that it exists as a concept. The unit on display in Boston “stood about the size of a desktop computer and was the shape of a human upper body without arms.” Sources at MIT say that “the robot has audio features that can be used to check on elderly patients at home and would be linked to a network to alert clinicians elsewhere of a medical problem.” Other than that, not much information is available… It sounds like a much more sophisticated and interactive version of the iRobot ConnectR. Although CiCi could be just a proof of concept design, it’s also possible that iRobot is waiting to see what the reception is like for ConnectR before they commit to producing an elder care robot. It’s also worth noting that elder care robots are undergoing heavy development in Korea, and elder care was forecast to be a major part of the growing robotics market at RoboDevelopment.

[ Mass High Tech ]

Elvis the cat got into an accident with a truck and lost the use of his hind legs. His owner, BattleBot designer Carlo Bertocchini, did the only sensible thing and built a robot to help Elvis get around. Elvis is able to accelerate and steer the bot with his front paws, and he seems to get the idea. It turns out that Elvis is not the first cyborg cat; apparently the CIA tried to turn cats into eavesdropping devices back in the 60s. You can read more about that, and decide for yourself whether it’s true or not, here.

[ Team BioHazard ] VIA [ Fark ]

Here’s a strange case of monkey see, monkey do, with a bionic twist. In February of 2005, Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh successfully created a robot arm and hand that could be controlled by a monkey’s thoughts. Now they’ve stretched that experiment across the globe. Researchers at Duke University implanted electrodes in the brains of two rhesus monkeys and studied the electrical impulses that drive their legs. Next they mapped signals to specific leg movements and used a monkey in North Carolina to transmit signals via the Internet to the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan, in order to control robot legs on their end.

They are hoping that this may eventually lead to mind-controlled robot legs for humans that are paralyzed. Robot legs of the future will be just a matter of routine thought.

[New Scientist] VIA [The Raw Feed]

Most types self-configuring modular robots (like these and these) divert a substantial amount of time and energy towards figuring out where they are and where they need to go in relation to their other pieces. If you make the modules small enough, though, they can take advantage of the random motions generated by their environment to move around. Give them a little bit of AI, and they’ll be able to build themselves up into large and complex structures simply by selectively attaching themselves to other modules. Although the principle of operation can be observed at macro sizes, stochastic robots get more efficient at smaller scales, since you can throw more of them into close proximity with each other, increasing the chances of a favorable configuration occurring. So, imagine that you need a nanobot to perform microsurgery on your brain… Instead of implanting the robot itself, you could just be injected with a bunch of stochastic modules. As the modules bounced around in your bloodstream, they’d gradually coalesce into a functional robot, which could perform its task, and then disassemble itself for disposal. Quick, clean, and easy.

[ Cornell Computational Synthesis Lab ]

Created by Chonnam National University, this crablike micro-bot is designed to scurry along your arteries and unblock them. It not only looks like a crab, it walks in the same manner. Surprisingly, the researchers discovered that the robot can travel 55 yards in three weeks time. Once it gets to it’s designated location, it releases drugs that disintegrate the blockage.

Even more impressive is the robot’s energy source. It doesn’t have one. It’s three hind legs are longer than the front three, so it attaches to the heart muscle and the legs bend at the time of cardiac contraction, which propels the machine forward. Should an alternate energy source be needed, the sugar in the blood takes care of that. Testing hasn’t started yet, but I’m betting they act fast with this one. Here’s hoping they test it in tiny clogged pipes before humans… (Image not the actual bot. Courtesy of The Raw Feed)

[Telegraph] VIA [The Raw Feed]

Don’t be fooled by the picture, Ninjas will not be wearing these devices. But in the future anyone with leg injuries, or even the elderly may be sporting something like this on their hip. Honda is applying some of the things they learned from designing Asimo, their robot mascot, to the area of rehab. When we last saw Asimo, he was chatting it up with humans and showing off his running skills. Now it seems that some of the engineering that went into making him is beginning to surface in other areas.

Aside from making you look like a robot cowboy with a mean holster, this strange apparatus is capable of learning how you walk and by doing so, will assist your stride with its motors. There isn’t very much info other then that at the moment, but it’s safe to say that Honda sees opportunity in the elderly/rehabilitation sector.

There seems to be a growing fascination with assimilating our elderly into cyborgs. I always thought the young would be the first to fall prey to our metal overlords. The other week I reported on a robot suit that could give the elderly super strength. It will be interesting to see where all of this leads.

[MedGadget] VIA [Ubergizmo]