The first Robot to help cognitive loss.

He is a very friendly assistant.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have developed a small desktop robot called Carmen designed to help people with mild cognitive impairment. Carmen, which is short for cognitively assistive robot for motivation in neurorehabilitation, assists patients in learning skills to Improve memory, attention and executive functioning at home.

The team responsible for the study worked closely with doctors and individuals with mild cognitive impairment and their caregivers to develop this innovative robot. What makes Carmen unique is its ability to teach compensatory cognitive techniques, which are practical strategies to improve memory and executive function.

In continuous development.

For those who want to delve into the technical details the full research is available on Github and the link is in the Reference; Carmen is a technology that integrates a tablet and a social robot platform, facilitating multimodal communication and increasing accessibility; based on the flexi robot from the University of Washington.

Carmen underwent significant hardware modifications, in addition to having all software written from scratch using the Ros operating system programmed to provide a series of simple cognitive training exercises, Carmen includes interactive games and activities designed to help users develop habits and useful strategies, for example, Carmen can teach establishing fixed places for important items such as keys or adopting effective methods of writing down to remember crucial information.

Ease of reaching more people.

One of the main objectives of the team was to ensure that the robot could be operated independently by users without the need for constant supervision by researchers or clinicians, in addition the robot was designed to operate even in conditions of limited internet connectivity, considering that many people do not have reliable access to the network.

The researchers are now working to deploy Carmen in more homes and improve her conversational skills while ensuring users' privacy. They are also looking to solve accessibility issues for those who have difficulty with touch screens and improve the robots' conversational interaction. , they are also exploring how Carmen can help people with other conditions such as ADHD.