The SPRING project’s Advisory Board, composed of renowned experts of the field from around the world, released its final comments regarding the last developments of the project; and pointing towards necessary improvements so as for social robotics to become a more mature field.
Detailed comments are consigned in Deliverable D9.7, which you can read here.
The final Advisory Board meeting took place on March 2024, so as for the project to showcase its (almost) final developments in order to receive valuable insights regarding the larger issue of social robotics that the consortium in its whole or part could tackle in future endeavours.
Participants were:
- Laurent Zanetton, President, Groupement Hospitalier Nord-Dauphine (GHND)
- Marco Inzitari, President, Societat Catalana de Geriatria I Gerontologia (SCGiG)
- William Kearns, Past President, International Society for Gerontechnology (ISC)
- Jose M Alvarez, Senior Research Scientist, NVIDIA
- Jeffrey Cohn, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburg
- Louis-Philippe. Morency, Professor, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
- Ramesh Jain, Professor, University of California Irvine
The Advisory Board recognised the overall results of the project as exceptional. The experimental side of the project raised interest, partly due to the scarcity of similar experiments in this field; and partly because it provided first results regarding usability and acceptability in a real-world setting. However, it was noted that features specific to a humanoid robot (to the contrary to, for example, a simple conversational agent) were not tested in the real-world setting (this being due to the ethics committee-imposed restrictions). Therefore, this aspect should be further tested in future works, with a variety of audience groups.
Valuable input was received regarding the overall technology gaps to deployment of social robots as well. In particular were mentioned:
– The need for social robots’ co-design with concerned professionals for each field (e.g. medical staff for the healthcare sector);
– The need for more complex emotion recognition mechanism, and to connect those to speech behaviour;
– More fundamentally, the need to better anticipate for hallucinations and/or new, unexpected behaviour.
Finally, for the healthcare sector, the Advisory Board recommended evaluation by clinical experts so as to refine the platform and develop specialised services.
