Paper Reading AI Learner

Wellness Robots and the Path to Full Autonomy

2026-11-06 03:19:49
Mohammad H. Mahoor, Matthew Hessler, Lombe Chileshe, Ola Alsaadi, Eshrat Emamian, Kerstin S. Haring, Richard M. Voyles
arXiv_RO
         
Abstract

This paper introduces the autonomous wellness robot as a distinct category of socially assistive system, defined by its capacity to continuously assess and respond across the seven ICAA dimensions of wellness (see Figure 2). We propose the Care Robot Autonomy Scale (CRAS): a six-level taxonomy (L0-L5) modeled on the automotive automation standard SAE J3016 and evaluated across four wellness-aligned dimensions. We present Ryan, developed initially at the University of Denver and commercialized by DreamFace Technologies, as a case study. NIH/NIA-funded longitudinal evidence (N = 18; 887 hours) shows statistically significant cognitive improvement (SLUMS +2.61, p = 0.015) and a clinically meaningful directional reduction in depressive symptoms (PHQ-9 -2.50, p = 0.073), with no novelty effect. We position Ryan today at CRAS Level 1-2, with emerging Level 3 capabilities in some dimensions, and outline a three-phase roadmap to L5 (full autonomy) by the early 2030s.

Abstract (translated)

URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08930

PDF

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2611.08930.pdf

Tags
3D Action Action_Localization Action_Recognition Activity Adversarial Agent Attention Autonomous Bert Boundary_Detection Caption Chat Classification CNN Compressive_Sensing Contour Contrastive_Learning Deep_Learning Denoising Detection Dialog Diffusion Drone Dynamic_Memory_Network Edge_Detection Embedding Embodied Emotion Enhancement Face Face_Detection Face_Recognition Facial_Landmark Few-Shot Gait_Recognition GAN Gaze_Estimation Gesture Gradient_Descent Handwriting Human_Parsing Image_Caption Image_Classification Image_Compression Image_Enhancement Image_Generation Image_Matting Image_Retrieval Inference Inpainting Intelligent_Chip Knowledge Knowledge_Graph Language_Model LLM Matching Medical Memory_Networks Multi_Modal Multi_Task NAS NMT Object_Detection Object_Tracking OCR Ontology Optical_Character Optical_Flow Optimization Person_Re-identification Point_Cloud Portrait_Generation Pose Pose_Estimation Prediction QA Quantitative Quantitative_Finance Quantization Re-identification Recognition Recommendation Reconstruction Regularization Reinforcement_Learning Relation Relation_Extraction Represenation Represenation_Learning Restoration Review RNN Robot Salient Scene_Classification Scene_Generation Scene_Parsing Scene_Text Segmentation Self-Supervised Semantic_Instance_Segmentation Semantic_Segmentation Semi_Global Semi_Supervised Sence_graph Sentiment Sentiment_Classification Sketch SLAM Sparse Speech Speech_Recognition Style_Transfer Summarization Super_Resolution Surveillance Survey Text_Classification Text_Generation Time_Series Tracking Transfer_Learning Transformer Unsupervised Video_Caption Video_Classification Video_Indexing Video_Prediction Video_Retrieval Visual_Relation VQA Weakly_Supervised Zero-Shot