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A Humanoid Social Robot Based Approach for Indoor Environment Quality Monitoring and Well-Being Improvement

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Abstract

The indoor environmental quality (IEQ) monitoring inside buildings where people spend most of their time is essential for ensuring their well-being. Traditional approaches based on Building Automation and Control Systems consider buildings equipped with many different sensors. Unfortunately, the sensors are not always placed for taking the measurements at the right positions. Besides, users could feel a negative perception due to continuous supervision. The present work proposes an approach based on a social humanoid robot that monitors indoor environmental quality. It friendly interacts with occupants providing appropriate suggestions. Particularly, the social robot has been endowed with cognitive capabilities that ground on (i) a proper ontology that formalizes the IEQ domain, (ii) on formal definitions of normative standards based on deontic logic, and (iii) on algorithms for reasoning about the compliance of the environment with the normative standards. The proposed approach has been experimentally verified in some offices of the National Research Council of Italy located in Palermo, and it has involved ten participants. It is worth noting that at the end of the measurement campaign appears that in some cases, compliance with the standard does not imply the user’s well-being and vice versa.

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Notes

  1. Hygienic Comfort is introduced for completeness of the ontology, although it is not addressed in this paper.

  2. It is worth noting that we did not use the Nao’s internal microphone because it does not give correct measurements, which are influenced by the noise produced by its cooling fan that is positioned near the microphone.

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Funding

This work was conducted in the framework of the project AMICO - Medical Assistance In COntextual awareness - (CUP B46G18000390005). Facilitation marked by the identification code ARS01_0090.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of High Performance and Networking (ICAR), National Research Council (CNR), Palermo, Italy

    Patrizia Ribino, Marina Bonomolo, Carmelo Lodato & Gianpaolo Vitale

Authors
  1. Patrizia Ribino
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  2. Marina Bonomolo
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  3. Carmelo Lodato
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  4. Gianpaolo Vitale
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Correspondence to Patrizia Ribino.

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Ribino, P., Bonomolo, M., Lodato, C. et al. A Humanoid Social Robot Based Approach for Indoor Environment Quality Monitoring and Well-Being Improvement. Int J of Soc Robotics 13, 277–296 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-020-00638-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-020-00638-9

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