Visual-Based Hearing-Dog Robots For Users With Hearing Impairment

Abstract

With the advancement of robotics and related cross-technologies, robots are becoming ubiquitous not only in industrial applications but also in social services. Socially service robot aims to assist vulnerable people with rehabilitation training and life adaption. For example the number of people with hearing impairment, reaching 466 million across the world in 2018. One promising way to help is to use hearing-dog robots. Some research has shown that touch-based hearing dog robots have positive impacts on altering users. However, few studies have verified the effectiveness of visually attracting users’ attention by a hearing-dog robot and of a variety of interactive ways to convey the information. To fill this gap, this paper will build a robot system that is capable of visually prompting users, including sound recognition, body movement, LED screen, cross barriers, and face detection. The experimental tests involving 16 participants were conducted to assess the effectiveness of this robot, proving that our proposed robot system can provide effective assistance within the appropriate field of view, in an interactive way to convey sound for people with hearing impairment.