HBO-ICT students deliver end products for research group Digital Life
09-06-2020
Friday May 29. was an exciting day: 38 first-year AUAS-ICT students, who participated in the Project Agile Development (PAD), spread over eight teams, presented their end products in groups via digital means. All end products were dedicated to the Robotics in Healthcare project, where the Digital Life research group conducts research together with partners in the field into the development and use of robotics in healthcare institutions to provide support to healthcare professionals and clients.
The first deserved compliment was that all teams were able to deliver within the estimated time, despite the unexpected obstacles they faced in COVID-19. In addition, a number of teams had actually considered the target group - lonely elderly people in care homes - thus clearly increasing the real application possibilities of their project in practice.
Of the very diverse end products, the following two projects stood out:
A Multifunctional App -
Just like a Swiss army knife, this app offers many different applications, such as:
- operating a robot as a music player with a selection of music from earlier times, in which the robot also started dancing.
- using a Kinect (a camera with accompanying software, similar to Wii and Play Station Move), which allows interaction through, for example, gestures, which are made with the entire body and are forwarded via the Kinect to the robot, which then replicates the same movements on location in the care home.
Using a robot as a quizmaster -
- here, in an inventive way, signs with figures (such as a circle, triangle, rectangle, etc.) are used, where each figure can also have four colors to be used to give a correct answer. The robot, or say quizmaster, is programmed in such a way that it can trace the correct answer - in terms of figure and color - to the various quiz questions.
- aim of this application is to increase social contacts among lonely elderly people in care homes. At the same time, health care professionals can be relieved so that they can take on other tasks.
Finally, one of the eight finished products turned out to be of such high quality that our Digital Life research group has serious interest in follow-up cooperation. An example of connecting both education and research to the professional field. To be continued!
Curious about one of the end results? Click here for a video impression of a robot that can perform fitness exercises.