Meet CARMEN, a Robot That Helps People with Mild Cognitive Impairment

Next steps

Next steps include deploying the robot in a larger number of homes.

Researchers also plan to give CARMEN the ability to have conversations with users, with an emphasis on preserving privacy when these conversations happen. This is both an accessibility issue (as some users might not have the fine motor skills necessary to interact with CARMEN’s touch screen), as well as because most people expect to be able to have conversations with systems in their homes. At the same time, researchers want to limit how much information CARMEN can give users. “We want to be mindful that the user still needs to do the bulk of the work, so the robot can only assist and not give too many hints,” Riek said.

Researchers are also exploring how CARMEN could assist users with other conditions, such as ADHD.

The UC San Diego team built CARMEN based on the FLEXI robot from the University of Washington. But they made substantial changes to its hardware, and wrote all its software from scratch. Researchers used ROS for the robot’s operating system.

Many elements of the project are available at https://github.com/UCSD-RHC-Lab/CARMEN

CARMEN: A Cognitively Assistive Robot for Personalized Neurorehabilitation at Home

Anya Bouzida*, Alyssa Kubota*, Dagoberto Cruz-Sandoval, Elizabeth W. Twamley, and Laurel D. Riek. 2024. CARMEN: A Cognitively Assistive Robot for Personalized Neurorehabilitation at Home. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 55–64.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3610977.3634971

Learn more about research and education at UC San Diego in:

Artificial Intelligence