2_use_case_name: Evaluation of Autonomous Assistive Feeding System in Spinal Cord Injury Patients
3_agency: Department of Veterans Affairs
3_abr: VA
4_bureau: VHA: Veterans Health Administration
8_topic_area: Health & Medical
10_commercial_ai: None of the above.
11_purpose_benefits: The AI use is to improve autonomous bite acquisition by robotic arm as well as to improve transfer to the participant's mouth.  Inputs include video analysis of caretakers administering/transferring bite to participants, as well as a web interface where feedback from stakeholders will be collected to improve the robotic arm's actions and to provide additional contextual information for bite acquisition and transfer.  This information will be used by the AI to improve the robotic arms autonomous functions of bite acquisition and transfer.

The ultimate goal of the robotic arm function is to provide autonomous or semi-autonomous support to improve functional independence for patients with upper extremity weakness from spinal cord injury or other causes.
12_outputs:  Inputs and Outputs: Our experimental setup will consist of bite acquisition trials under two settings. In the autonomous setting, the robot will acquire the food autonomously. In the shared autonomy setting, the robot may acquire the food autonomously, but during certain times, may query the end-user or an expert research assistant based on its confidence about its manipulation actions and use their feedback to complete the bite acquisition process. For both the settings, the robot will use our online learning framework to design its behaviors. In the shared autonomy setting, we will develop an accessible web interface that the stakeholders can use to provide feedback on what actions to use or what additional contexts may be useful for bite-acquisition
16_dev_stage: Acquisition and/or Development
17_impact_type: Safety-impacting
18_date_initiated: 5/13/2024
19_date_acq_dev_began: 5/13/2024
22_dev_method: Developed in-house.
24_hisp_support: Yes
25_hisp_name: Veterans Health Administration
27_public_info: No
29_contains_pii: Yes
30_saop_review: No
31_data_catalog: No
33_agency_data: Will obtain video and input data from trials of robotic feeding arm once research begins proper
34_data_docs: Documentation is missing or not available: No documentation exists regarding maintenance, composition, quality, or intended use of the training and evaluation data.
35_demo_features: Other
35_question_type: data will be collected by video analysis, user/stakeholder input to continually refine the motions of the robotic arm used for bit acquisition and bite transfer to patient
37_custom_code: Yes
38_code_access: No – agency does not have access to source code.
40_has_ato: No
42_dev_tools_wait: 6-12 months
43_infra_provisioned: No
45_compute_request: Yes
47_timely_resources: Yes
49_existing_reuse: None: This use case does not re-use any internally developed tooling or managed infrastructure from any other AI development efforts within the agency.
50_internal_review: No documentation is available: No documentation detailing model performance metrics, model architecture, features and intended use of the models have been created or are currently accessible to other data science teams within the agency.