Abstract
Over the last two decades, several deployments of robots for in-house assistance of older adults have been trialled. However, these solutions are mostly prototypes and remain unused in real-life scenarios. In this work, we review the historical and current landscape of the field, to try and understand why robots have yet to succeed as personal assistants in daily life. Our analysis focuses on two complementary aspects: the capabilities of the physical platform and the logic of the deployment. The former analysis shows regularities in hardware configurations and functionalities, leading to the definition of a set of six application-level capabilities (exploration, identification, remote control, communication, manipulation, and digital situatedness). The latter focuses on the impact of robots on the daily life of users and categorises the deployment of robots for healthcare interventions using three types of services: support, mitigation, and response. Our investigation reveals that the value of healthcare interventions is limited by a stagnation of functionalities and a disconnection between the robotic platform and the design of the intervention. To address this issue, we propose a novel co-design toolkit, which uses an ecological framework for robot interventions in the healthcare domain. Our approach connects robot capabilities with known geriatric factors, to create a holistic view encompassing both the physical platform and the logic of the deployment. As a case study-based validation, we discuss the use of the toolkit in the pre-design of the robotic platform for an pilot intervention, part of the EU large-scale pilot of the EU H2020 GATEKEEPER project.
Highlights
A problem many modern societies face is that of a rapidly aging population
A frequently used example of mobile platform with screen is Giraff [35]. This robot is designed to support telepresence and has been successfully used in many projects (e.g., VictoryaHome [85], GiraffPlus [25], and ExCite [21]) to implement video calls and remote interactions between the patient and the caregivers. As it can be seen from this overview, after the initial success of MOVAID, mobile manipulators have been absent from healthcare robotics for several years, the only exception being Care-o-bot, even though this shifted its focus to different applications, to accommodate for the challenges created by the presence of a robotic arm
While the notion of healthcare intervention is not new, in what follows we introduce the Robotic Intervention Design Toolkit we developed for bridging the logic of the healthcare intervention within the design of a robotic platform
Summary
A problem many modern societies face is that of a rapidly aging population. In some countries, the over 65 years old already outnumber the younger cohorts. Even after three decades of activity and many prototypes, there is still no commercially ready robotic intervention for elderly care, which can support independent ageing at home. This is the case mostly because of the intrinsic complexity of the tasks the robot has to achieve [16], the unpredictability of a domestic environment [4], and the unstructured interaction with the users [26]. This work has two main contributions: i) a landscape analysis where we analyse in detail the evolution of in-house robot assistants for elderly care and ii) an interventioncentred framework for the co-design of robotic interventions in healthcare. In the concluding section, we briefly discuss a number of open challenges that need to be tackled to ensure an effective deployment of robotic interventions in the home assistance domain
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