Donate to Science & Enterprise

S&E on Mastodon

S&E on LinkedIn

S&E on Flipboard

Please share Science & Enterprise

Grants Awarded for Robotics, Cyber-Vision and Child Health

Xbox sensor image (Univ. of Minnesota)

Image from an Xbox Kinect sensor (Univ. of Minnesota)

A research team at University of Minnesota in Minneapolis received two grants totaling more than $3 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for technology to help diagnose children’s mental health disorders. The grants, totaling more than $3 million, were awarded by NSF’s Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Major Research Instrumentation programs.

The Minnesota team led by computer science and engineering professor Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos aims to create robotic devices and computer vision algorithms that help diagnose children at risk of developing disorders such as autism, attention deficit disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder. The robotics technology is intended to observe and automatically analyze abnormalities in children’s movements and behaviors.

The researchers have been using the Xbox Kinect to track the subjects —  a video from the university shows footage of images from an Xbox Kinect sensor — but in the future the technology could be expanded. By using new types of robots, such as robot pets and robotic sandboxes, equipped with specialized detectors and software, the researchers will analyze the probability of abnormalities based on facial expressions and body positions.

The research seeks to create diagnostic instruments for mental disorders that combine the fields of computer vision, robotics, and computer science with child psychology and psychiatry. With these tools, the research team hopes to create more effective tools for detecting at-risk children at an earlier age.

Read more: Robots to Help Children With Autism

*     *     *

4 comments to Grants Awarded for Robotics, Cyber-Vision and Child Health