Education and healthcare set to drive high tech
Increased human-machine interaction is expected to bring notable improvements in supporting learning and access to healthcare.
In a classroom in Switzerland, two kids are engrossed in navigating a complex maze with the help of a cute little robot. The interaction is easy and playful—it also provides researchers with valuable information about how children learn and the conditions under which information is most effectively absorbed.
Rapid improvements in human-machine visual interaction (HMI) are poised to kick-start major changes in society. In particular, two European research projects show how these trends can affect two core areas: education and healthcare.
learning children
Funded by the EU CARTOON, a cross-border network of universities and industry partners is exploring whether and how robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) can help us learn more effectively. One idea revolves around making mistakes: children can learn by detecting and correcting others’ mistakes—and it can be helpful to let robots make mistakes.
“A teacher cannot make mistakes,” said project coordinator, Professor Mohamed Chetouani of the Sorbonne University in Paris, France. “But a robot? They can. And mistakes are very useful in education.”
According to Professor Chetouani, it is simple to ask questions like “can robots help children learn better” because learning is a complex concept. He says that, for example, any automatic assumption that students who focus on the lesson will learn more is not necessarily true.
That’s why, from the outset, the project asked smarter, more specific questions to help determine how useful robots can be in the classroom.
ANIMATAS is made up of subprojects, each led by an early-stage researcher. One of the objectives of the subproject is to better understand study process in children and analyze what types of interactions help them retain information best.
Robot role
An experiment set up to investigate this question invited children to team up with the appropriately named QTRobot to find the most efficient route around the map.
During the exercise, the robot will interact with the children to give tips and suggestions. It is also carefully measuring various indicators of children’s body language such as eye contact and direction, tone of voice and facial expressions.
As expected, the researchers did indeed find that certain types of interactions corresponded to improved learning. With this information, they will be better able to assess children’s engagement with educational materials and, in the long run, develop strategies to maximize that interaction—thereby boosting their learning potential. practice.
Future steps will include looking at how to tailor this robotic reinforcement learning to your needs. children with special educational needs.
“We believe it could be really important in this context,” said Professor Chetouani.
Help at hand
Aki Härmä, a researcher at Philips Research Eindhoven in the Netherlands, believes that robotics and AI will fundamentally change healthcare.
In EU funding PhilHumans On a project he is coordinating, early-stage researchers from five universities across Europe work with two commercial partners—R2M Solutions in Spain and Philips Electronics in the Netherlands—to find understand how advanced technology can improve people’s health.
Härmä says AI makes new services possible, and “that means healthcare can be up and running 24/7”.
He points to the huge potential of technology to help people manage their own health at home: apps that can monitor a person’s mental and physical state and detect problems early, chatbots can provide advice and suggest diagnostics and algorithms for the robot to safely navigate around the place.
empathetic bots
The project, which started in 2019 and will last until the end of 2023, consists of eight sub-projects, each led by a PhD student.
A sub-project, overseen by Phillips researcher Rim Helaoui, is looking at how specific skills of mental health practitioners—such as empathy and open-ended questioning—have can be coded into an AI-powered chatbot. This could mean that people with mental health conditions will be able to access appropriate supports at home, possibly at a lower cost.
The team quickly realized that recreating the full spectrum of psychotherapy skills in a chatbot would involve challenges that couldn’t be solved all at once. Instead, it focuses on one key challenge: how to create bots that show empathy.
“This is a necessary first step to making people feel they can open up and share,” says Helaoui.
To start, the team created an algorithm that can respond with the right tone and content to convey empathy. The technology has yet to be transformed into an application or product, but provides a building block that can be used in a variety of applications.
rapid progress
PhilHumans is also exploring other possibilities for AI in healthcare. An algorithm is being developed that could use “camera vision” to understand the tasks a person is trying to perform and analyze the surroundings.
The ultimate goal is to use this algorithm in a home assistant robot to help people with cognitive impairments successfully complete daily tasks.
One thing that has helped the whole project, says Härmä, is the speed at which other organizations are developing natural language processors with impressive capabilities, such as GPT-3 from OpenAI. The project hopes to be able to exploit the unexpectedly rapid improvements in these and other areas to move faster.
Both ANIMATAS and PhilHumans are actively working to push the limits of visual HMIs.
In doing so, they provided a valuable training ground for young researchers and gave them important exposure to the commercial world. Collectively, the two projects are ensuring that a new generation of highly skilled researchers is equipped to take the lead in the field of HMI and its potential applications.
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Horizon: EU Journal of Research & Innovation
quote: Education and Healthcare Set to Drive High Tech (2023, Jan 6) accessed Jan 6, 2023 from https://techxplore.com/news/2023-01-health- high-tech-boost.html
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