Assistance For Elderly People Research Articles

An Improved Algorithm for Collision Avoidance in Environments Having U and H Shaped Obstacles

This paper proposes a novel obstacle avoidance algorithm for autonomous mobile robot control. The proposed approach brings a solution to the problem of robot traversal in critical shaped environments and offers several advantages compared to the reported approaches. The algorithmic approach, named as, Intelligent Follow the Gap Method (IFGM) is based on improved Intelligent Bug Algorithm (IBA) and Follow the Gap Method (FGM). The robot field of view is taken into consideration. The IBA avoids obstacles by following their edge and scanning the path to destination, thus making the approach goal-oriented avoiding local minimum problem. To characterize the performance of IFGM, various scenarios of obstacles are considered. These scenarios range from having obstacles defined by simple and symmetrical shapes to critical shaped obstacles. The simulation results demonstrate that the algorithm results in safer and smoother trajectories in the presence of obstacles. It offers fast convergence and does not suffer from local minima. Finally, the performance comparison of the proposed algorithm with that of the reported approaches in terms of distance-time plots confirms the efficacy of the presented approach. The proposed algorithm lends itself to future implementations in the navigation of mobile and industrial robots, especially in applications exhibiting crucial time and critical obstacles including disaster management, spy, elderly people assistance and soccer games.

Being Part of the Family: Social and Working Conditions of Female Migrant Care Workers in Italy

This paper will present a study examining the social and working conditions of immigrant women who work in the family and the field of elderly people's assistance in private houses in Italy. The research will focus on categories such as social class, “race”, and gender, variables that stratify and naturalize the inequalities inbred in the social relations between immigrant caregivers and the families they work for. I will seek to illustrate through these perspectives how an affective and family life of their own is denied to these care workers. I will further investigate how the relationship between the care worker's body and the elderly care receiver's body becomes structured and characterized each time differently on the basis of gender. Moreover, I will take a closer look at the relationship of the female worker with her own body and disease, and also at the relationship of the care worker with death and money.

Tracing Commodities in Indoor Environments for Service Robotics

Daily life assistance for elderly people is one of the most promising scenarios for service robots in the near future. In particular, the go-and-fetch task will be one of the most demanding tasks in these cases. In this paper, we present an informationally structured room that supports a service robot in the task of daily object fetching. Our environment contains different distributed sensors including a floor sensing system and several intelligent cabinets. Sensor information is sent to a centralized management system which processes the data and makes it available to a service robot which is assisting people in the room. We additionally present the first steps of an intelligent framework used to maintain information about locations of commodities in our informationally structured room. This information will be used by the service robot to find objects under request. One of the main goal of our intelligent environment is to maintain a small number of sensors to avoid interfering with the daily activity of people and to reduce as much as possible the invasion of their privacy. In order to compensate this limited available sensor information our framework aims to exploit knowledge about people's activity and their interaction with objects to infer reliable information about the location of commodities. This paper presents simulated results that demonstrate the suitability of this framework to be applied to a service robotic environment equipped with limited sensors. In addition we discuss some preliminary experiments using our real environment and robot.

10A-A-1 高齢者の握力補助のためのパワーアシストグローブの開発(A会場 大学院生・学部学生 奨励賞セッション 一般講演)

10A-A-1 高齢者の握力補助のためのパワーアシストグローブの開発(A会場 大学院生・学部学生 奨励賞セッション 一般講演)

Exploratory design and evaluation of a homecare teleassistive mobile robotic system

Telehealth assistive technologies for homes constitute a very promising avenue to decrease load on the health care system, to reduce hospitalization period and to improve quality of life. Teleoperated from a distant location, a mobile robot can become a beneficial tool in health applications. However, design issues related to such systems are broad and mostly unexplored (e.g., locomotion and navigation in-home settings, remote interaction and patient acceptability, evaluation of clinical needs and their integration into health care information systems). Designing a safe and effective robotic system for in-home teleassistance requires taking into consideration the complexities of having novice users remotely navigate a mobile robot in a home environment while they interact with patients. This paper presents the progress made by adopting an interdisciplinary and exploratory design methodology to develop a telepresence assistive mobile robot for homecare assistance of elderly people. Preliminary studies using robots, focus groups and interviews allowed us to derive preliminary specifications to design a new mobile robotic system named Telerobot. Telerobot’s locomotion mechanism provides improved mobility when moving on uneven surfaces, helping to provide stable video feed to the user. Its control system is implemented for safe teleoperation. A study involving 10 rehabilitation professionals confirms that the system is usable in-home environments. Analysis of teleoperation strategies used by novice teleoperators suggest that it is essential in a home environment that the teleoperation interface provides the user with a visual feedback of the objects surrounding the robot, their distances relative to the robot and the size of the robot in the environment. Enhanced user interfaces to augment the operator’s perception of the environment were elaborated and tested in controlled conditions. Based on the progress made so far, the paper outlines issues that will be addressed in future work with the objective of coming up with a complete, efficient and usable in-home teleassistance mobile robotic system.

End User Context Modeling in Ambient Assisted Living

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) services provide intelligent and context aware assistance for elderly people in their home environment. Following the vision of an open AAL service marketplace, such an approach has to support all lifecycle phases of an AAL service, starting with its specification and development until its operation within the user’s smart environment. In AAL the support of a user level context model becomes important. This enables an inhabitant of a smart home to get and give feedback on context without technical expertise and intensive training. At the same time, the context model has to be operational and to support context dependent service adaption and abstraction of the underlying context sensors. This leads to a layered context model for AAL with abstraction levels for different aspects. In this paper we focus on the requirements, the model elements and the concepts of the user interface layer of our approach.

Mobile Robot Command by Man–Machine Co-Operation – Application to Disabled and Elderly People Assistance

Disabled people assistance is developing thanks to progress of new technologies. A manipulator arm mounted on a mobile robot can assist a disabled person for a partial restoration of the manipulative function. A user pilots the robot via a control station, using enhanced reality techniques. To be affordable such a system must be cost-effective. That constraint limits perception means: ultrasonic ring, dead reckoning, and low-cost camera. The development of the project has followed two stages. The first one consists of giving maximum autonomy capacities to the robot for planning, navigation, and localisation. The second stage is the study of the Man–Machine Co-operation (MMC) for the command of the robot system. Indeed, the aim is to perform a mission (mobile robot displacement), using the robot capacities and man possibilities. Users build their own strategies to carry out a mission successively. The strategy can be seen as a succession of control modes, which can be manual, automatic, or shared. In the latter case, the control of the robot is shared between a human operator and machine. The main problem is then task allocation between both intelligent entities. Each one has planification, navigation, and localisation abilities. The paper presents our approach for planning and navigation and develops a more specific study about robot localisation.

Care or Control: Barriers to Service Use by Elderly People

This article presents descriptive findings from a 3-year project that examined barriers to receiving effective health care service from the viewpoint of elderly people living in an inner city. The convenience sample consists of 38 elderly people identified by clinicians providing hospital and community care as at risk of institutionalization. Based on the elderly persons' descriptions of their problems, these clinicians developed innovative strategies for making the service delivery system more responsive. Individual situations were reviewed retrospectively to identify trends in the types of barriers to effective service delivery. McKnight's paradigm, contrasting human interactions in a control model to those where participation occurs by consent, was found useful in conceptualizing barriers to effective care, as exemplified by these individual situations Previous care, which the elderly people perceived as controlling, contrasted sharply with their expectations for full participation in the definition of both problems and solutions. Thus clmical practice and the research focus of the project evolved to offer elderly people assistance in ways that facilitated their full participation.

Staying Put: A New Development in Policy?

ABSTRACTThe ordinary housing in which most old people live is a subject of growing concern in many countries. The idea of ‘staying put’ which has emerged recently in the UK from this growing concern is thus timely for it focuses specifically on housing assistance for elderly people who remain in conventional domestic housing. This paper attempts to identify a number of cross-national trends which suggest the relevance of ‘staying put’ to other countries, and presents a detailed study of the factors shaping the development of such policy in the UK. The present legislative framework for ‘staying put’, and the extent to which it is exploited are also discussed.