Natural Teaching of Robot-Assisted Rearranging Exercises for Cognitive Training

Abstract

Social Assistive Robots are a powerful tool to be used in patients’ cognitive training. The purpose of this study is to evaluate a new methodology to enable caregivers to teach cognitive exercises to the robot in an easy and natural way. We build upon our existing framework, in which a robot is employed to provide encouragement and hints while a patient is physically playing a cognitive exercise. In this paper, we focus on empowering the caregiver to easily teach new board exercises to the robot by providing positive examples. The proposed learning method has two main advantages (i) the teaching procedure is human-friendly (ii) the produced exercise rules are human-understandable. The learning algorithm is validated in 6 exercises with different characteristics, correctly identifying and representing the rules from a few examples.