Call for Participation
The Healthcare Robotics Technologies - Metrified (HEART-MET) competition aims to address the growing age-related healthcare costs and quality of life problems, which threaten the stability and safety of the social security systems in charge of paying and maintaining a high quality of healthcare. Assistive robots can address some of these problems by supporting caregivers in their work by performing routine tasks. The competition addresses tasks that directly impact the user's well-being, in a complex and unstructured domestic environment. This implies the use of a wide variety of functionalities, and requires a strict validation of the safety of the robotic behaviours. The robots are evaluated on functionalities such as object detection, activity recognition, object handover, task-oriented grasping and speech understanding, which are required to complete tasks such as assessing the activity state of a person, delivery items such as medicines to a person and preparing and transporting a drink.
The competition is open to researchers, companies, student teams etc. who wish to benchmark their robots and software on functionalities which are relevant for assistive robots in a healthcare setting. It consists of two parts: field evaluation campaigns, where teams participate with their robots at a physical test-bed, and cascade evaluation campaigns, in which teams participate online, evaluating their software on datasets. Each field and cascade campaign will evaluate a selection of functionality and task benchmarks outlined in the Evaluation Plan.
The schedule for the competitions is as follows:
| Campaign type | Time | Location |
| Field evaluation campaign - dry run | November 2020 | HBRS/UWE/HWU/UniFI |
| Cascade evaluation campaign - dry run | 1st quarter 2021 | online |
| Field evaluation campaign - 1st campaign | May 2022 | UoN |
| Cascade evaluation campaign - 1st campaign | July - October 2022 | online |
| Field evaluation campaign - 2nd campaign | 2nd quarter 2023 | UniFI |
| Cascade evaluation campaign - 2nd campaign | 3rd quarter 2023 | online |
The dry-run field evaluation campaign for the HEART-MET competition will take place in November 2020. The dry-run will be conducted at the test-beds at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg (HBRS), University of Nottingham (UoN), Heriot-Watt University (HWU) and Università degli Studi di Firenze (UniFI). Teams are not expected to travel to the test-beds (due to potential travel restrictions caused by COVID-19), however those who wish to participate by performing the tasks in their own labs are encouraged to contact the organizers at healthcare@metricsproject.eu for more information.
Additional information:
For the first dry-run field campaign, teams are not expected to travel to the test-beds (due to potential travel restrictions caused by COVID-19), however those who wish to participate by performing the tasks in their own labs are encouraged to contact the organizers at healthcare@metricsproject.eu for more information.