Robotic Platforms for Assistance to People with Disabilities

• Other Authors: Jara, Carlos A. (Editor), Corrales Ramón, Juan Antonio (Editor)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2022
• Subjects: Humanities; Social interaction; sensors; electronic platform; machine learning; wearables; hand motor rehabilitation; sEMG; hand pose; social robot; physical human-robot interaction; assistive robotics; collaborative robots; brain-machine interfaces; EEG; exoskeleton; motor imagery; human-robot interaction; human pose estimation; robotic rehabilitation; visually impaired assistance; navigation system; knowledge graph; dialogue system; NLP; reasoning; multimodal interfaces; robotic exoskeleton; n/a
• Online Access: DOAB: download the publication; DOAB: description of the publication

People with congenital and/or acquired disabilities constitute a great number of dependents today. Robotic platforms to help people with disabilities are being developed with the aim of providing both rehabilitation treatment and assistance to improve their quality of life. A high demand for robotic platforms that provide assistance during rehabilitation is expected because of the health status of the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has resulted in countries facing major challenges to ensure the health and autonomy of their disabled population. Robotic platforms are necessary to ensure assistance and rehabilitation for disabled people in the current global situation. The capacity of robotic platforms in this area must be continuously improved to benefit the healthcare sector in terms of chronic disease prevention, assistance, and autonomy. For this reason, research about human-robot interaction in these robotic assistance environments must grow and advance because this topic demands sensitive and intelligent robotic platforms that are equipped with complex sensory systems, high handling functionalities, safe control strategies, and intelligent computer vision algorithms. This Special Issue has published eight papers covering recent advances in the field of robotic platforms to assist disabled people in daily or clinical environments. The papers address innovative solutions in this field, including affordable assistive robotics devices, new techniques in computer vision for intelligent and safe human-robot interaction, and advances in mobile manipulators for assistive tasks.