Audio-visual feedback for cognitive assistance toward walk training

The paper describes audio-visual feedback to assist people´s cognitive activities by using a mobile robot. Robot assistance provides promising aid for people in rehabilitation. In literature, physical assistance with power-assist limbs and mobile support platforms have been studied well. On the other hand, cognitive assistance also plays an important role in rehabilitation especially for recognition of own actions. We propose a novel robot platform for cognitive assistance that gives effective reference of actions. Lucia, a cognitive assistant robot is capable of interacting with people by pattern projection and sound generation based on recognition of people´s posture and movements. In this paper we will define a framework of cognitive assistance and then detail the implementation of the robot and its control system. In experiments we evaluated effect of audio-visual feedback for improvement in motor control. The experimental results suggested that audio-visual feedback of own actions positively affected to improve the success rate of the task movements.