June 03, 2024 | Praachi Mudar, University High School
Praachi Mudar (in pink) said she enjoyed working with Wendy Rogers, center, and the LIFE Home team. (Photo provided)
Before this summer, whenever I thought of robots, I thought of the clunky Disney robot WALL-E and his mission to save mankind. I didn’t have any direct experience interacting with robots or the components involved, so my only point of reference was a kid’s movie. This summer Dr. Wendy Rogers and Dr. Harshal Mahajan gave me the opportunity to intern at the McKechnie Family LIFE Home. I spent my summer with social robots, assistive robots, home appliances, virtual reality and other technology that are used to help people’s daily lives, which completely changed my understanding of robots and technology.
One of my favorite parts of this experience was interacting with the social and therapeutic robots—Moxie, Jibo and Paro. I had engaging conversations with Moxie about celebrity book authors using her generative AI. In the game Circuit Saver, I saved Jibo’s motherboard, and in doing so, learned about its camera and motion sensors. I also experienced Paro’s calming effect when petting it. It was especially exciting to have the freedom to interact with the robots in ways that interested me, like getting to play games with them or talk about my own interests. It was incredible to not only learn about these robots’ capabilities but also see how they can assist people with daily tasks like grabbing pill bottles or talking to their family from miles away.
The most challenging part of this experience was coming into a space I had so little knowledge about. For the first few weeks I struggled to understand basics, like how to start up the robots and navigate the robots’ interfaces, but I was surrounded by patient and knowledgeable people who helped me understand and learn. By the end of the internship, I was knowledgeable about most if not all of the technology. I likely wouldn’t have enjoyed or learned as much if it hadn’t been for the support I got from Dr. Samuel Olatunji, my supervisor; Abbey Paik, an undergrad intern; and Yvona Vlach, the operations coordinator.
As I got more comfortable with the robots, I really enjoyed doing demonstrations and sharing information about the robots with people on tours. Almost all of the technology had an immense amount of research surrounding it. The research I learned about the most displayed the ways these robots can help people who face social isolation and older adults who need help with basic tasks. It was exciting to explore this growing field. Even more so, I enjoyed sharing this knowledge and explaining the research being conducted with these robots at the LIFE Home.
This summer has been an incredible opportunity that I am so grateful to have. It has genuinely made me more interested in the intersectionality of technology and applied health sciences.
Dozens of students from AHS lined the walls of Huff Hall to present findings from their recent research endeavors.
Kinesiology senior Ilya Ahmad stands with his research presentation on Wednesday, April 26, 2023.
By ETHAN SIMMONS
For her last semester as an undergraduate student, Daniela Hernandez spent a lot of time in campus libraries—more than the Community Health major had in her entire college career.
But all of Hernandez’s hours in the Main Stacks and Grainger Engineering Library went toward a worthy cause: conducting a literature review for her first research study, exploring the labor market value of Spanish-English bilingualism.
“It was very ambitious of me to do this my last semester of college, but it was something that I had never done before,” Hernandez said. “So I was like, ‘Why not?’”
Hernandez is enrolled in the Illinois Academic Enrichment and Leadership Program or I-LEAP, a support and mentorship program for underrepresented minority students, student-athletes and first-generation students in the College of Applied Health Sciences such as her.
“I’m excited to pass this on to my (I-LEAP) mentee and just say, ‘Hey, this is a great opportunity to develop those skills that you might not have,” she said.
Dozens of students from AHS lined the walls of Huff Hall on Wednesday to present findings from their recent research endeavors working in the labs of their mentors. The presentations coincided with the university-wide Undergraduate Research Symposium on April 27.
Plenty of paths exist for AHS undergrads looking for research involvement. There’s Students Pursuing Applications, Research and Knowledge (SPARK), which onboards high-achieving freshmen into research programs within the college, and Student Aging Researchers in Training (START), which brings students from underrepresented backgrounds into aging research.
Department of Speech and Hearing Science juniors Natalia Rzepa and Holly Panfil found their first research experiences through START and SPARK, respectively.
Both found their way into in SHS Associate Professor Raksha Mudhar’s Aging and Neurocognition Lab and stuck around because they liked it so much.
With SHS doctoral candidate Lizzy Lydon and School of Molecular and Cellular Biology senior Sharbel Yako, the group compared brain activity between older adults and younger adults during word recall tests.
Though both groups performed comparably in the test, event-related spectral perturbation data collected from participants suggested older adults had to use higher levels of neural compensation during the exercise, Panfil said.
“Research opens a lot of doors, and I think that we’re so lucky to be at a university that has so many different labs and ways to get involved,” said Panfil, who’s heading for a Fulbright-MITACS Globalink research internship in Canada this summer. “I’d really recommend it to anyone to just give it a shot.”
For Recreation, Sport and Tourism sophomores Genna Peters and Vanessa Ramos, their presentation “Developing a Quality Evaluation Protocol for Racial Equity Park and Recreation Plans” was just a snapshot of their progress. Working with mentors RST Associate Professor Mariela Fernandez and doctoral student Wonjin Jeong, the students will reach out to community members.
Ramos, who transferred to Illinois from DePaul, called her first stab at research “a great experience.”
“Being able to learn how to work as a group, collect data, and just having someone to guide me through my first year at UIUC has been very helpful,” Ramos said.
“Research opens a lot of doors, and I think that we’re so lucky to be at a university that has so many different labs and ways to get involved. I’d really recommend it to anyone to just give it a shot”
Holly Panfil
Undergraduate in Speech and Hearing Science
Especially for underclassmen, joining a study can seem an intimidating task. Community Health sophomore Afnaan Afsar Ali transferred into AHS late last year, wanting a “broader outlook” on healthcare, but didn’t initially care for exploring any research opportunities.
“I think there’s a lot of fear when you first begin to try and get into a research lab,” Afsar Ali said. “But it does get easier, the whole purpose of research is so that you are able to develop as well.”
However, some of the college’s work with health technology caught her interest. She contacted the Human Factors and Aging Laboratory led by KCH Professor Wendy Rogers, which connected the sophomore to an interview-based project involving sociable robot “Misty,” one of which exists inside the McKechnie Family LIFE Home.
The project titled “Understanding the Role of a Socially Assistive Robot to Successfully Age in Place” surveyed eight older adults on their comfortability and interest in the open-source programmable robot after seeing videos of Misty in action.
The eight adults, surveyed from across the country, all had warm responses on Misty’s appearance, size and functions, Afsar Ali said. Participants came up with three main use areas for the robotic companion: Completing domestic tasks, setting daily reminders, and socializing at home.
Afsar Ali assisted in the literature review, sifting through previous research on the role of robots and health tech in the lives of older adults, and helped conduct video conference interviews with participants.
“I realized that we have a really big misconception about how older adults feel about technology,” Afsar Ali said. “I thought that they wouldn’t be open to it at all, but they really are—they want to be involved and have more technology in their lives, things that can support them.”
With a bit of luck, undergrads can find research labs that perfectly fit their interests. Fitness buff Ilya Ahmad, a senior in Kinesiology, combined two of his favorite topics for his presentation: working out and hormone function.
Under KCH Assistant Professor Diego Hernandez-Saavedra, Ahmad reviewed the effects of anabolic steroids on the body. He discussed how steroids impedes the body’s ability to produce testosterone, which can cause decreases in testicular size, sperm count and sex drive. Steroids can also cause other hormone dysregulation, and even cause DNA damage, he said.
A first-generation student, Ahmad said he had “no idea about research” when he came to the University of Illinois. He wants to attend medical school after graduation, but knows he wants to keep research in his life.
“I love research. I love endocrinology,” Ahmad said. “It’s kind of cool to show people things that are based on research findings.”
Find out more about the AHS Undergraduate Research Expo at this site, including a list of all projects.
The goal is to create a scalable, affordable, flexible Stretch Cognitive and Physical Assistant that can improve the quality of life for older adults with a range of cognitive and physical impairments
University of Illinois researcher Dr. Wendy Rogers is stretching her work with Stretch the Robot.
The Kinesiology and Community Health professor has received a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institute on Aging (National Institutes of Health), for approximately $2.5 million.
The research will be conducted between December 2022 and November 2024 and builds on a Phase I grant that Rogers and Dr. Aaron Edsinger, CEO of Hello Robot, received last year. Other Illinois collaborators on the new grant include Speech and Hearing Science Associate Professor Raksha Mudar and Harshal Mahajan, Assistant Director of Research for the McKechnie Family LIFE Home. Also part of the new team are ClarkLindsey, an independent, senior living community in Urbana, Ill.; Dr. Vy Nguyen, an occupational therapist at Hello Robot; and Dr. Charlie Kemp, director of the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech and CTO of Hello Robot.
Phase I explored the use of Stretch, a research robot designed by Kemp & Edsinger, to support everyday activities through use of a lightweight telescoping arm mounted on a mobile base. That research identified home tasks for which support is needed; developed tools to enable Stretch to effectively perform these tasks; and designed an easy-to-use interface that older adults can use to control Stretch to carry out their desired tasks.
The Phase II grant will advance the capabilities of Stretch, in partnership with ClarkLindsey, focusing on physical and cognitive tasks. The aim is to determine how assistive robots can support the needs of older adults with cognitive impairment in addition to those with mobility impairment. The researchers plan to refine the remote control interface to be used by caregivers, develop autonomous activities for Stretch, and explore Stretch’s utility in a variety of home environments, including common rooms with multiple people.
The goal is to create a scalable, affordable, flexible Stretch Cognitive and Physical Assistant that can improve the quality of life for older adults with a range of cognitive and physical impairments, the researchers say.
In addition to ClarkLindsey, research and testing for this grant will be conducted at the McKechnie Family LIFE Home on the University of Illinois campus.
As with most of the research agenda for the LIFE Home, the focus is to support healthy aging in midlife and older adulthood. KCH Assistant Professor Shannon Mejia is spearheading some of the research opportunities, including one that involves a voice assistant that guides participants through a study.
“We’re testing ideas that people, in the future, are using these types of devices to provide task assistance,” Mejia said.
Mejia said she and a collaborator—Jesse Chin, an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences—are studying the outcome of enrichment seeking, which she describes as “the process of this willingness to go out and challenge yourself” as opposed to the idea of learning to dependence.
“Your entire room is connected and automated, or your kitchen is automated … Why cook for yourself when your voice assistant and kind of run the show for you?” Mejia said.
But Mejia said the objective is to provide conversations with a voice assistant that is “supporting the motivation to be independent.
“So, even though you could ask (the voice assistant) to turn on a light for you from the nature of your interaction with her you’d almost be compelled to try to do it yourself.”
Starting in February, some 70 participants will be going through the LIFE Home five days a week, Mejia said, led by a voice assistant, taking part in a series of games designed to cognitive well-being, on a tablet. The voice assistant will guide participants through the games and gauge their feelings after each game.
The study participants will spend about two hours in the LIFE Home dining/living room area and the home office. The LIFE home mimics a natural environment and the home illusion, , Mejia said, allows us to accurately measure participants’ cognitive and emotional responses during the study.
The hope, Mejia said, is that they conduct science that can optimize voice assistant technology so that it can encourage more exploration over exploitation and build independence.
“Then, even as people are bringing technology into their home, they can do it that could, in a way, increase independence,” she said.
The project involves the use of Stretch, a research robot designed for homes
Kinesiology and Community Health Professor Wendy Rogers is no stranger to robots.
She began working with robots more than two decades ago at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she was a professor in the School of Psychology, and director of the Human Factors & Aging Laboratory. It was at Georgia Tech where Rogers connected with Professor Charlie Kemp, director of the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech.
Now the two are collaborating on a robot that can help people age in place, a vital part of Rogers’ research agenda.
Rogers and her collaborators, which include Dr. Harshal Mahajan and Dr. Travis Kadylak from KCH, received a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research Grant from the National Institute on Aging—a division of the National Institutes of Health—for a project entitled, Stretching Their Reach: Robotic Support for Domestic Activities for Older Individuals with Mobility Limitations.
Rogers is the Principal Investigator for the University of Illinois, and Dr. Aaron Edsinger is the Principal Investigator for Hello Robot, the company he co-founded with Kemp. The grant amount is $256,064. The project involves the use of Stretch, a research robot designed for homes. The research will identify home tasks for which support is needed; develop tools to enable Stretch to effectively perform these tasks; and design an easy-to-use interface that older adults can use to control Stretch to carry out their desired tasks.
Developed by Kemp and Hello Robot co-founder Aaron Edsinger, former robotics director at Google, Stretch weighs about 50 pounds and costs less than $20,000. A robot resides at the McKechnie Family LIFE Home, which Rogers directs, where researchers are assessing how Stretch can support tasks around the home, investigating facilitators and barriers to usage, comparing different ways of controlling the robot, and determining the level of instructional support necessary to make it user friendly.
When Kemp and Edsinger created Stretch, it was immediately clear to them who they wanted to work with.
“Dr. Rogers was one of the first people Hello Robot spoke with when we were exploring viable research and commercial paths for Stretch,” Edsinger said. “Dr. Rogers and her team are doing incredible work to support the independence of people aging in place. We thought Stretch would be a great tool to advance her team’s research on robots as assistive devices.”
In fact, in a new course offered this semester at Illinois called Human-Robot Interaction in Community Health, Rogers is focusing on how robots can be used to improve health and well-being in populations with diverse needs and abilities.
Edsinger said the goal of the SBIR grant is to “demonstrate the feasibility of Stretch as an assistive device for older adults with mobility and cognitive impairments. We plan to obtain feedback from older adults and explore tasks and tools that could be beneficial. These will be valuable steps towards our long-term goal of assisting older adults with disabilities.”
Edsinger even sees potential commercial applications for Stretch.
“Stretch is intentionally designed to be used around people. We envision a future where Stretch is a platform that equips people to create a variety of businesses with mobile manipulators.”
One thing is certain; this collaboration between Hello Robot and Rogers is not the last.
“Hello Robot deeply respects the work Dr. Rogers and the Illinois team are doing to promote the independence of adults aging with physical and cognitive disabilities,” Edsinger said. “We hope that this is just the beginning of a long-standing collaboration to advance the usefulness of robots as assistive devices in people’s homes. “
The McKechnie Family LIFE Home is a cutting-edge research center focused on innovations in home environments
Jim and Karen McKechnie are the primary donors for the McKechnie Family LIFE Home
Even for someone as accomplished as Kinesiology and Community Health Professor Wendy Rogers, the night of Oct. 7 represented a milestone.
Rogers has so many appointments and affiliations—she is a Khan Professor of Applied Health Sciences; she directs the Collaborations in Health, Aging, Research, and Technology, or CHART, initiative in AHS; the Health Technology Education Program, which offers a one-of-a-kind master’s degree in health technology; and the Human Factors and Aging Laboratory—that during her introduction for the dedication of the McKechnie Family LIFE Home on Oct. 7, College of Applied Health Sciences Dean Cheryl Hanley-Maxwell had to pause and catch her breath.
But with all the federal funding Rogers has received and the collaborations she’s sparked, the McKechnie Family LIFE Home holds a special and unique place for her.
The McKechnie Family LIFE Home is a cutting-edge research center focused on innovations in home environments. This facility mimics existing home dwellings as well as provides space for the development of next generation smart homes that would allow people of all ages and abilities to live fuller, healthier, and autonomous lives.
“I am delighted that the name of the facility is the Family LIFE Home because that is what home is all about—family,” Rogers said during the dedication ceremony. “Family has always been at the heart of my life and my work. I am the youngest of six children. I grew up in a small house in Massachusetts—we had eight people in a three-bedroom home with one bathroom—imagine that. We had no choice but to be close.”
Rogers said that of her inspiration for creating a facility such as the LIFE Home is that because of the support of her and her siblings, her parents were able to continue living until their final days in the family home.
“I remember when my Dad was near the end of his life (back in 2005) and we were all coordinating his care, he said to me, “We need more of that smart technology of yours,”’ Rogers told attendees of the dedication ceremony, which included University of Illinois Chancellor Robert Jones and Jim and Karen McKechnie, the primary donors of the LIFE Home.
“After he died and my mom, was alone we certainly relied on technology tools to remain connected with her and to provide the support she needed,” Rogers said.
That is Rogers’ goal for the McKechnie Family LIFE Home.
“Our vision is to develop technologies that can support quality of life in the home for everyone, people of all ages and abilities. We want to think about all of the activities that occur in the home from fundamental activities of daily living such as bathing, eating, mobility through to the enhanced activities of daily living such as social engagement, community participation, and lifelong learning.”
For Chancellor Jones, the opening of the facility was the culmination of what the university sought in bringing Rogers aboard.
“Professor Rogers, in some ways, today marks the completion of a full circle for the two of us,” Jones said. “I had the honor of speaking at your investiture ceremony just a few months after I came here to Illinois. You were recruited here under one of the initiatives laid out in the university’s Visioning Future Excellence strategic plan. And now, just four years later, we can draw a bright and clear line from that starting point to today’s dedication of the McKechnie Family LIFE Home.”
To an observer, the LIFE Home looks like someone’s home: it has two bedrooms, a bathroom, an open-concept kitchen—we all know, thanks to HGTV how popular that is these days—a living room, dining room and even some green space outside. But the LIFE Home is foremost a research facility. The site is available for use by researchers from within and outside the university, or for collabortions with companies who want to use the facility to conduct research and test new products.
“It is a space in which researchers from across the campus, industry partners, healthcare providers, and community stakeholders can come together to develop and test technologies that support all dimensions of healthy, socially connected, independent living,” Dean Hanley-Maxwell said.
Chancellor Jones praised the McKechnies for their generosity and said, “I don’t think there are any more visible examples of the impact of private investment in public universities. These gifts are direct investments in ideas and in human potential. They are feeding the true heart of this college and this university.”
And as much as the dedication ceremony of the facility proved to be a key step, Rogers said there was much still to do.
“It really has been a labor of love –we are all passionate about improving people’s quality of life and believe in the potential of this space to support that mission. This is only the beginning.”
The main objective of the one-year project is to explore the potential for soft robots for telehealth monitoring of older adults
The McKechnie Family LIFE Home is a cutting-edge research center focused on innovations in home environments.
An increasing number of older adults live independently but have health conditions that must be managed—both chronic and acute. A grant awarded to an interdisciplinary team including KCH Professor Wendy Rogers aims to investigate some solutions to those issues.
Rogers will be working with Professor Girish Krishnan, an assistant professor in The Grainger College of Engineering, and Dr. Robert Riech of OSF HealthCare on a newly funded $74,086 grant from the Jump Applied Research through Community Health through Engineering and Simulation (ARCHES) program of OSF HealthCare.
The main objective of the one-year project is to explore the potential for soft robots for telehealth monitoring of older adults.
Soft robots, for the uninitiated, are composed of soft, elastic materials and offer unique opportunities in areas in which conventional rigid robots are not viable; for example, for drug delivery, non-invasive surgical procedures, as assistive devices, prostheses or artificial organs.
The project will have two prongs in the next year: first, there will be the design and building of a soft robot with a camera that can navigate toward a wound or other area of an older patient.
Krishnan has already built some soft robotic actuators known as Fiber Reinforced Elastomeric Enclosures (FREEs). The robots can achieve different motions such as bending, contraction and axial rotation.
The researchers plan to investigate a technique known as visual servoing, by which the robot can position its arms near a wound or a predetermined area, guided by visual feedback from the camera; the second aim involves exploring the needs of those who will interact with the robot, specifically healthcare providers and older adults.
Researchers plan to interview the healthcare providers to identify the cases in which the robots would be commonly used. They willl also interview older adults to determine how to build trust between them and the robots with which they will interact.
The interactions will take place in the new McKechnie Family LIFE Home on campus, Rogers said. The home simulation space will be used to enable older adults to interact with the robot prototypes. The video capabilities and remote access lab in the LIFE Home will also support the simulation of telehealth contexts for the healthcare providers to assess the utility of the prototypes.
If successful, the use of soft robotics for older adults through telehealth could disrupt the market as a cost-effective and safe alternative to more-costly health care. Additionally, the robots could be fitted with a gripper that could help older adults with daily activities such as reaching into kitchen cabinets, loading dishwashers and searching for lost items.
