AIDA: An Assistant for Workers with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Abstract

Roughly 1 in 5 people in the United States have an intellectual or developmental disability (IDD), which is a substantial amount of the population. In the realm of human-robot interaction, there have been many attempts to help these individuals lead more productive and independent lives. However, many of these solutions focus on helping individuals with IDD develop social skills. For the solutions that do focus on helping people with IDD increase their work productivity, many of these involve giving the user control over a robot that augments the worker’s capabilities. In this thesis, it is posited that an autonomous agent could effectively assist workers with IDD, thereby increasing their productivity. The artificially intelligent disability assistant (AIDA) is an autonomous agent that uses social scaffolding techniques to assist workers with IDD. Before designing the system, data was gathered by observing workers with IDD perform tasks in a light manufacturing facility. To test the hypothesis, an initial Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) experiment was conducted where subjects had to assemble a box using only either their dominant or non-dominant hand. During the experiment, subjects could ask the robot for assistance, but a human operator controlled whether the robot provided a response. After the experiment, subjects were required to complete a feedback survey. Additionally, this feedback was used to refine and build the autonomous system for AIDA. The autonomous system is composed of data collection and processing modules, a scaffolding algorithm module, and robot action output modules. This system was tested in a simulated experiment using video recordings from the initial experiment. The results of the simulated experiment provide support for the hypothesis that an autonomous agent using social scaffolding techniques can increase the productivity of workers with IDD. In the future, it is desired to test the current system in a real-time human-subjects experiment before using it to assist workers with IDD.