Cognitive therapies have been shown to enhance the quality of life and well-being of people living with dementia (PwDs). However, their use remains limited due to a shortage of trained professionals and the significant time and training required of informal caregivers. To address this gap, we developed and deployed a social robot capable of autonomously delivering cognitive stimulation therapy (CST) in the home. Nine PwDs participated in a one-week ($7$ days) study that involved daily robot-led sessions. Participants engaged positively with the system, completing nearly half of the scheduled sessions, an adherence rate higher than typically observed in caregiver-led CST. Our findings also highlight the crucial role of family members, who often supported session initiation and occasionally joined the activities, enriching the interactions. This work demonstrates the feasibility and potential of socially assistive robots to deliver in-home cognitive therapy, offering a scalable approach to extend access to dementia care.
Indoor robots are increasingly employed for facility management tasks such as cleaning and inspection. These applications primarily rely on navigation and can be effectively supported by predefined routes or perception-driven Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technique…
Social appropriateness in human-robot interaction (HRI) is not universal: different people can judge the same robot action differently in the same situation. To capture this inter-subject variability, we reformulate socially appropriate action generation as a preference modelling…
Many Blind and Low-Vision (BLV) people rely on guide dogs for moment-to-moment navigation, such as staying on path and avoiding obstacles and pedestrians. However, guide dogs are expensive to acquire and maintain (approximately \$50k USD plus ongoing costs), often involve long wa…
Laboratory automation accelerates discovery, yet its adoption is constrained by the high cost, proprietary design, and limited remote supervisability of commercial liquid-handling systems. This work presents RAINBOT\textsuperscript{TM}, a low-cost, openly reproducible liquid-hand…
Flexible manufacturing requires rapid deployment of solutions and minimal setup time to remain competitive. An essential attribute is the ability to control error levels, as failures can range from minor performance degradation to severe equipment damage. However, conventional de…
Autonomous robotic craniotomy requires continuous regulation of tool-tissue interactions to mitigate mechanical overload and thermal damage while maintaining surgical efficiency. However, this process is inherently partially observable due to unknown, time-varying tissue properti…