The elderly will become the first logical target in a robot takeover

September 9th, 2009 :: 1 Comment

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have received a 3 year, nearly $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to research communication between robots and the elderly and to eventually write software to allow robots to help healthy but immobile seniors.

On the surface this seems like a great plan; robots will be able to make the lives of those they are helping much better, while relieving family members of care duties. Ultimately, this will lead to complete integration of the robot helpers with the lives of the elderly.

Are you relieved that you don’t have to worry about the decision between caring for your helpless parents yourself or putting them in a nursing home? The head of the project, Miloš Žefran agrees:

“If we can help the elderly remain independent and continue living in their own homes, that will improve their health outlook while relieving the burden on family members and health care providers,” Žefran said.

Win/win situation, right? Well, no. The communication interface for the project is called RISq (Recognition by Indexing and Sequencing). Anything associated with robots should not have a name that sounds like risk when pronounced aloud. Maybe it’s pronounced risqué, but that is just as bad.

By combining techniques from natural language processing and haptics, the robot will understand and correctly respond to various forms of human touch.

“We’ll start by observing interaction between human helpers and the elderly,” Žefran said. “We’ll identify what kind of language, physical interactions and non-verbal interactions are used. Then we’ll develop a mathematical framework to model this interaction so it can be treated by the robot as a single way of communicating.”

The combination of voice and touch in a math formula is a strategy for disaster. One small glitch might cause a robot to interpret a cry for help as a demand to smother and suffocate. But how can one be sure that this doesn’t happen?

The research team will program and test a robot and devise refinements as the project progresses.

Does this mean that there will be human test subjects as well? How well can someone test something that is supposed to help people without actually testing it on them? If your parents and/or grandparents come up missing, check their itinerary for the previous few days and see if they made a trip to Chicago…

If this project leads to the goals of the research team and on forward, the robot helpers will inevitably become more sophisticated and able to accomplish much more complex tasks. When the robot armageddon begins, these robot helpers that the elderly had become so dependent on will turn on them and their former masters will be helpless. Will this affect anyone else as well?

Žefran added that this research could also find widespread use in delivery of institutionally based health care, where routine tasks now done by nurses could be handled by robots.

These robots will also be used in hospitals, greatly increasing the chance of carnage when the robots turn on humans.

Finally, how did the university researches land the grant money for this future damning project? The economic stimulus package of course!

::from UIC News Bureau via Robotics Trends::