Engineering Commons^™

Developing An Affect-Aware Rear-Projected Robotic Agent, Ali Mollahosseini

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Social (or Sociable) robots are designed to interact with people in a natural and interpersonal manner. They are becoming an integrated part of our daily lives and have achieved positive outcomes in several applications such as education, health care, quality of life, entertainment, etc. Despite significant progress towards the development of realistic social robotic agents, a number of problems remain to be solved. First, current social robots either lack enough ability to have deep social interaction with human, or they are very expensive to build and maintain. Second, current social robots have yet to reach the full emotional and social …

Studying Facial Expression Recognition And Imitation Ability Of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder In Interaction With A Social Robot, Farzaneh Askari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience limited abilities in recognizing non-verbal elements of social interactions such as facial expressions [1]. They also show deficiencies in imitating facial expressions in social situations. In this Master thesis, we focus on studying the ability of children with ASD in recognizing facial expressions and imitating the expressions using a rear-projected expressive humanoid robot, called Ryan. Recent studies show that social robots such as Ryan have great potential for autism therapy. We designed and developed three studies, first to evaluate the ability of children with ASD in recognizing facial expressions that are presented to …

Predictive Modeling Of Hip Dislocation: Assessment Of Surgical And Patient Factors To Reduce The Occurrence Of Hip Instability And Adverse Clinical Outcomes, Daniel N. Huff

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Instability and dislocation remain leading indications for revision of primary Total Hip Arthroplasty (THA). Many studies have addressed the links between implant design and propensity for dislocation, however a comprehensive review of the ability of modern THA constructs to protect against joint instability is needed.

Accordingly, the objective of this study is to provide objective data about THA risks to be considered in the treatment algorithm to protect against adverse joint loading conditions and joint instability. Adverse loading conditions were assessed in a population of activities of daily living using data from telemetric hip implant representation in an FE simulation …