Study of Effectiveness of Prior Knowledge for Smart Home Kit Installation.

Smart-Home in a Box (SHiB) is a ubiquitous system that intends to improve older adults' life quality. SHiB requires self-installation before use. Our previous study found that it is not easy for seniors to install SHiB correctly. SHiB CBLE is a computer-based learning environment that is designed to help individuals install a SHiB kit. This article presents an experiment examining how smart home sensor installation was affected by knowledge gained from two methods, SHiB CBLE, and a written document. Results show that participants who were trained by the CBLE took significantly (p<0.05) less time in the installation session than those in the control group. The accuracy rate of SHiB kit installation is 78% for the group trained by the CBLE and 77% for the control group. Participants trained by the CBLE showed significantly (p<0.01) higher confidence in the actual installation than those in the control group. These results suggest that having a training before the actual installation will help installers avoid unnecessary work, shorten the installation time, and increase installers' confidence.

Robot-Enabled Support of Daily Activities in Smart Home Environments.

Smart environments offer valuable technologies for activity monitoring and health assessment. Here, we describe an integration of robots into smart environments to provide more interactive support of individuals with functional limitations. RAS, our Robot Activity Support system, partners smart environment sensing, object detection and mapping, and robot interaction to detect and assist with activity errors that may occur in everyday settings. We describe the components of the RAS system and demonstrate its use in a smart home testbed. To evaluate the usability of RAS, we also collected and analyzed feedback from participants who received assistance from RAS in a smart home setting as they performed routine activities.

Nonconvex Policy Search Using Variational Inequalities.

Policy search is a class of reinforcement learning algorithms for finding optimal policies in control problems with limited feedback. These methods have been shown to be successful in high-dimensional problems such as robotics control. Though successful, current methods can lead to unsafe policy parameters that potentially could damage hardware units. Motivated by such constraints, we propose projection-based methods for safe policies. These methods, however, can handle only convex policy constraints. In this letter, we propose the first safe policy search reinforcement learner capable of operating under nonconvex policy constraints. This is achieved by observing, for the first time, a connection between nonconvex variational inequalities and policy search problems. We provide two algorithms, Mann and two-step iteration, to solve the above problems and prove convergence in the nonconvex stochastic setting. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of the algorithms on six benchmark dynamical systems and show that our new method is capable of outperforming previous methods under a variety of settings.