HRI Physio Lib

A software framework to support the integration of physiological adaptatin in HRI.

Description

HRI Physio Lib is a research project I created and worked on during my Master of Applied Science degree. I developed this project with the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Lab at the University of Waterloo, led by Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn.

The project aims to develop a framework for developing physiologically adaptive robotic scenarios. By exploring the designs of previously developed systems, we can better provide a general structure and multi-purpose tools to help facilitate the integration of physiological signals into human-robot interaction (HRI) applications.

Advancements in unobtrusive commercial wearable physiological sensors (such as the Apple Watch) have introduced new opportunities to develop interactive robots which respond and adapt to real-time measurements of autonomic responses. These can include subtle changes in heart rate, skin perspiration, body temperature, pupil dilations, and more. From these measurements, subjective experiences such as user-experience, task performance, emotions, and cognitive workload can be approximated.

The project is open-source and can be found here.

We have two publications describing a conceptual framework, and open-source software library to facilitate the development of physiologically adaptive HRI scenarios:

• HRI Physio Lib: A software framework to support the integration of physiological adaptation in HRI
• Connecting humans and robots using physiological signals – closing-the-loop in HRI