Socially Assistive Robotics and Wearable Sensors for Intelligent User Dressing Assistance*

Individuals living with cognitive impairments are faced with unique challenges in completing important activities of daily living such as dressing. In this paper, we present the first socially assistive robot-wearable sensors system to provide dressing assistance through social human-robot interactions. A novel robot-wearable architecture is development to classify, prompt and provide feedback on user dressing actions. Namely, strain sensor based smart clothing on the user are used for joint angle mapping, which are then classified into different dressing steps. The robot uses a MAXQ hierarchical learning method to learn assistive behaviors to aid a user with the sequence of dressing steps. Experiments were validated the performance of the joint angle mapping model, dressing action classifier, and behavior adaptation modules as well as the overall system for dressing assistance.