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Biography |
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Ronald C. Arkin received a BSc from University of Michigan, MSc from the Stevens Institute of Technology, and PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a Regents’ Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory, and Associate Dean for Research and Space Planning of the College. In 1997-1998, Professor. Arkin served as STINT visiting Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. In 2005, Professor Arkin held a Sabbatical Chair at Sony IDL in Tokyo, served as a member of the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Group at LAAS in Toulouse in 2005-2006. Dr. Arkin's research interests include behavior-based reactive control, action-oriented perception, deliberative/reactive architectures, robot survivability, multiagent systems, biorobotics, human-robot interaction, robot ethics, and learning in autonomous systems. He has over 170 technical publications. He has written several books: Behavior-Based Robotics (1998), Robot Colonies (1997), and Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots (2009). He serves as an Associate Editor for numerous journals and is the Series Editor for the MIT Press book series Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents. He serves on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology, served two terms on the AdCom of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, served as founding co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Robot Ethics, co-chair of the Society's Human Rights and Ethics Committee, and also served on the National Science Foundation's Robotics Council from. In 2001, he received the Outstanding Senior Faculty Research Award from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, and in 2011 received the Outstanding Achievement in Research Award from the University of Massachusetts Computer Science Department. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2003.
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Abstract |
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A Robotic Mediator to Preserve Dignity in Stigmatizing Patient-Caregiver Relationships |
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Ronald C. Arkin, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech, USA
Patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) experience challenges when interacting with caregivers due to their declining control over their musculature. In particular, the early stage Parkinson’s disease is characterized by facial masking that reduces the ability for a caregiver to effectively comprehend the emotional state of a patient. To remedy these challenges, we hypothesize that a robot mediator can be used to assist in the relationship between PD patients and their caregivers, reducing the stigmatization that often occurs due to this loss of nonverbal communication. To overcome this stigmatization, providing therapeutic robots with an ethical architecture can potentially help to ensure that patients’ and caregivers’ dignity is maintained. Towards this goal of maintaining effective patient–caregiver relationships and preventing the loss of dignity, we have developed two approaches to address this problem that leverages our prior research in ethical architectures. First, we are studying the introduction of a robotic co-mediator to increase the communicative bandwidth in this relationship for fostering empathic response in the caregiver. This requires modeling moral emotions in the patient, such as shame and embarrassment, while looking for lack of congruence in the caregiver regarding the perception of the emotional state of the patient. A PD patient is liable to suffer indignity when there is a substantial difference between his experienced shame and the empathy shown by the caregiver. When this difference strays from acceptable norms, the robotic agent will act using subtle, nonverbal kinesic (body language) cues to drive the relationship towards acceptable social and medical treatment norms with the intent of preserving patient dignity. We have also developed an extension of our robotic ethical governor that enables intervention should acceptable behavioral bounds be exceeded by either the patient or the caregiver. Here, the approach to uphold PD patient dignity is through the use of an ethical robot that mediates patient shame when it recognizes norm violations in the patient-caregiver interaction by overt robotic action using kinesic and verbal intervention as required.
This research is funded by the National Science Foundation National Robotics Initiative under Grant #IIS 1317214.
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