Sailesh Ramakrishnan and Martha E. Pollack, University of Pittsburgh
The NurseBot project is developing a mobile robot that is intended to assist elderly people suffering from mild cognitive disorders in their everyday life (see http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nursebot). One of the main components of the project is intelligent reminding, which is useful when an elderly person has mild memory problems. A key aspect of intelligent reminding is to identify which activities should be monitored and/or which reminders to issue. The intelligent monitoring system we are developing learns which activities need to be monitored, and when reminders need to be issued. It does this by representing the system’s belief about when the elderly person will perform various activities by means of a Bayesian Belief Net and running simulations of the future using this net.