Edge Hill University’s robot, Robbie, has become a soap fan after watching episodes of Emmerdale to learn about dementia.
Robbie has watched over 13 episodes of the popular soap featuring the storyline of dementia sufferer Ashley Thomas.
He can now spot signs of depression and aggressive behaviour in the hope that robots like him will be able to help people living with the condition.
Ardhendu Behera, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science who led the project with three students, said:
“There are 46.8M people living with dementia and this is set to rise to 115.4M in 2050. Depression and aggressive behaviour are often the most upsetting and challenging symptons for those closest to the person living with the condition.
“Currently the only ways to monitor and manage dementia is by direct observation which is labour intensive, time consuming and can be costly from a care perspective. Or there’s wearable bio-sensing devices.
“Monitoring and recognition is still very much in its infancy and we believe Robbie is the first robot to use vision-based recognition to recognise four behaviours; aggressive, depressive, happy and neutral.”
Ardhendu and the team chose the Emmerdale episodes as the Alzheimer’s Society described them as a ‘realistic portrayal’ of the condition.
They broke the 35-minute-long episodes featuring Ashley into 65,082 images, teaching Robbie to recognise facial expressions and body language. Third-year-student Zachary Wharton, from Ormskirk, added:
Ardhendu and the team chose the Emmerdale episodes as the Alzheimer’s Society described them as a ‘realistic portrayal’ of the condition.
They broke the 35-minute-long episodes featuring Ashley into 65,082 images, teaching Robbie to recognise facial expressions and body language. Third-year-student Zachary Wharton, from Ormskirk, added:
