The use of robotic platforms with social capabilities is becoming increasingly common to support people"s daily lives. Such systems are commonly referred to as Socially Assistive Robots (SAR). Many SARs focus on a human-machine interaction based on visual and sound information, which could limit access for users with sight, hearing, or cognitive impairments, as it is usual in health environments. In this paper, we report a qualitative evaluation of the accessibility of Inrobics Rehab platform, arehabilitation platform based on the NAO robot. From the main outcomes, we propose to augment communication channels in social rehabilitation robots with haptic devices. The main aim of this proposal is to increase the accessibility of the platforms by combining multimodal information provided by visual, sound, and tactil channels.
Classification
subjects
Computer Science
keywords
haptic device; accessibility; social assistive robotics; rehabilitation