A systematic mapping study of robotics in human care

Abstract

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that more than 1 billion people live with some form of disability. Moreover, the number of elderly is increasing in recent years. According to the United Nations (UN), in 2050, there will be 2.1 billion people above 60 years of age worldwide. Many of these people live alone in their homes or clinics and rely on some kind of help to fulfill their specific needs. In this context, emerging opportunities for the application of robotics to support ubiquitous healthcare may reflect in reducing medical costs and increasing the convenience of patients and people in general. This paper presents a systematic mapping study to identify the application of service robots in the assistance of human care, focusing on the employment of computational technologies and unexplored research gaps in the literature. The study conducted searches in eight scientific repositories in the area of service robots through a systematic filtering process to remove bias. Afterward, the filtering process allowed to reduce from an initial sample of 9372 to 69 studies. As a result, these studies were reviewed entirely, analyzed, and categorized to answer six research questions. In addition, the study proposed four taxonomies illustrating the state-of-the-art of robotics in human care. The results highlight therapy and entertainment as the most common categories of the usage of robotics in human care. The most widely-used technologies to integrate with smart environments are smartphone sensors, smart device integration, wearables, and cloud services. The most frequently used mean of human–robot interaction is verbal communication, which is useful to help the elderly, children, and people with a mental health disorder. The most commonly cited diseases were cognition impairment, autism spectrum disorder, and motor impairment. Finally, we observed a trend in the growth of the use of service robots to improve the intelligence of the environment supporting human care. The scientific contribution of this article are four taxonomies that classify and group caregiver robots according to the application, integration with a smart environment, human–robot interaction, and target audience. This study also allowed the learning of 11 lessons on methodological and technological aspects based on the profound research performed.