By Katarina Fiorentino Klatzkow
If you attended the College of Public Health and Health Professions Fall for All in 2023 or the Giving Day celebration in the HPNP courtyard this spring, you may have noticed a small orange and blue robot following behind students and staff members.
ROTAG, aptly named by PHHP students during an Instagram naming contest, is a cargo-carrying robot built with smart following technology. Designed by Piaggio Fast Forward, a Massachusetts-based robotics technology company dedicated to improving mobility for the human-built environment, ROTAG is the first of its kind to roll across UF’s campus.
But how did ROTAG make its way from Boston’s cobblestone streets to the grassy expanse of the Swamp?
The answer is Hongwu Wang, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the PHHP department of occupational therapy and Director of the Technology for Occupational Performance, or TOP, lab.
With a background in biomedical engineering and rehabilitation science, Wang applies technological approaches to address issues in occupational performance, mobility, participation and quality of life for people with disabilities and older adults. His research focuses on user participatory design, rehabilitation robotics, machine learning, assistive technology and sensor-based outcome measures.
His work has been funded by the National Institute on Disability Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research, the Administration for Children & Families, the Department of Education and the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation.
Wang describes the research being conducted in his TOP lab and shares the impact robots like ROTAG can have on the lives of older adults and individuals with disabilities.
Question: How did you first become involved with this type of robotic technology?
Answer: In the TOP lab, we operate under three pillars (identify and adapt existing technology with user needs, modify and improve existing technology solutions, and design and develop innovative technology) of work to serve individuals with disabilities and older adults. One of these pillars is identifying and adapting technology based on user needs. This is how the ROTAG project started.
I had a specific request from one of my research participants who needed help with carrying heavy items during their daily shopping activities. They didn’t have the stability to carry more than 10 pounds of extra weight because they used a walker, so they came to me to find a solution. I did some research and found a company that designs robots specifically for carrying weight for people.
I have experience working with industrial collaborators, so I reached out to them regarding their product and was sent some samples. I presented the robots to some of our participants and found that they work, but don’t address all the problems these target populations are facing. That’s when I started working on how to make this technology more functional for individuals with mobility challenges.
Q: How can a robot like ROTAG make a difference in the lives of older adults or individuals with disabilities?
A: One of my research participants loves social engagements, and her community regularly hosts gardening events or cooking gatherings. But she has a lot of difficulty carrying her gardening tools or baking supplies, so that has limited her participation in activities of daily living that she enjoys. We trialed ROTAG with her and she was able to put all of her gardening and baking tools into the robot, and the robot followed her to where they were holding the activity.
The individual I referenced earlier who uses the walker during grocery trips used to attach his grocery bags to the back of his walker. As you can imagine, the walker is not designed to hold all that weight, which presents safety concerns. With ROTAG, he is able to put his groceries into the cargo container and then the robot will follow him without any extra weight on him and his walker.
Right now, I am working with engineer collaborators on field studies related to human-robot interactions to build the next generation of this robot that is more user-friendly for individuals with vision, hearing and mobility impairments.
Q: What are your goals for future work in adaptive robotics?
A: My biggest hope is establishing connections and collaborations with industrial partners earlier in the prototyping stage, so there is less re-engineering to make the product accessible and functional for older adults and individuals with disabilities. I’d like for researchers and therapists to have more engagement with industrial partners to help them better understand the challenges specifically facing these target populations as well.
I’d also like to pursue different funding mechanisms to expand my research in human-driven robotics for rehabilitation and functional independence. Eventually, I’d like to to develop and assess robotic technology for fall detection and avoidance, with hopes of impacting insurance policy to cover robotic technology for those individuals in need.
Currently, we are also working on developing a touchscreen interface on the robot versus a physical button, as well as a voice interface option. So, you could speak to the robot like what people do with Amazon’s Alexa, and it will wake up and come over to you.
If you are using a smartwatch, you could synchronize the data from your watch to the robot and ask questions like: ‘How was my sleep last night?’ Or adding a feature that reminds older adults to take daily medications. Those are our goals for long-term development.
Also, we don’t have a lot of research surrounding real-life human robot interaction. So, we’d like to deploy the robot to be with participants for a longer period in natural settings so we can get rich datasets about how the user interacts with the robot.
Q: What is one thing you’d like people to know about ROTAG?
A: There’s a real, definite misalignment between the expectations of the user and what robotics like ROTAG can deliver, because most of the time users learn about robotics from an article or from a research paper, which mostly happened in a very controlled environment. So that’s actually a huge problem. Because when some of the older adults talk to me, they say: ‘Oh, we wanted this robot that can do this. But it can’t do that.’ There are a lot of things the robot cannot do.
From the technology perspective, we want to engage interest, and we want people to try it. But then, if the expectation is too high, after a short period of time the user gives up because they think: ‘Oh, no, this is actually not working.’ I’m hosting a lot of community-based educational workshops regarding these technologies because I want to give people the true and real capacity and limitations of this technology. I think that’s important, and if you disclose the limitations earlier, it is not going to hurt your technology because if the users can still benefit, they will try.