Elderly Care Robots Research Articles

EFFECTS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ON THE FUTURE OF HEALTH: A QUALITATIVE STUDY AMONG UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

To determine the opinions of university students about the effects of artificial intelligence on the future of nursing and healthcare. Artificial intelligence-generated changes will have a major impact on healthcare and nursing. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with university students. The study included 12 senior-level students’ participants, who were selected by simple random sampling from different departments of Turkish universities in Istanbul. The data were analyzed using qualitative thematic analysis. The participants defined artificial intelligence in terms of robots, robotized intelligence, machine learning and personal assistants. The participants listed the effects of artificial intelligence on nursing as a decrease in the number of nurses, a reduced workload for nurses, more effortless patient follow-up, a decreased margin of error, the use of robots for patient transport, the use of robots to position patients, the use of robots to measure vital signs, the use of robots in psychomotor skill training, use of robots in surgical operations, use of robots in elderly care and follow-up. In line with these results, it can be recommended that new subjects on artificial intelligence and its role in the future of healthcare be added to relevant educational programs. Nurse educators should develop courses in the curriculum that will increase student awareness of artificial intelligence.

Robots in Eldercare: How Does a Real-World Interaction with the Machine Influence the Perceptions of Older People?

(1) Background: Using autonomous social robots in selected areas of care for community-dwelling older adults is one of the promising approaches to address the problem of the widening care gap. We posed the question of whether a possibility to interact with the technology to be used had an impact on the scores given by the respondents in various domains of needs and requirements for social robots to be deployed in care for older individuals. (2) Methods: During the study, the opinions of older people (65+; n = 113; with no severe cognitive impairment) living in six social care institutions about a robot in care for older people were collected twice using the Users’ Needs, Requirements and Abilities Questionnaire (UNRAQ): after seeing a photo of the robot only and after a 90–150 min interaction with the TIAGo robot. (3) Results: Mean total scores for both assistive and social functions were higher after the interaction (p < 0.05). A positive correlation was found between opinion changes in social and assistive functions (r = 0.4842; p = 0.0000). (4) Conclusions: Preimplementation studies and assessments should include the possibility to interact with the robot to provide its future users with a clear idea of the technology and facilitate necessary customisations of the machine.

Distributed Measurement of Deformation Magnitude and Location with a Pair of Soft Sensors

Skin‐like sensitivity, or the capability to recognize tactile information, is essential for future robots in elder care, search and rescue, entertainment and other applications involving unstructured environments. In this paper, we propose the design of a flexible one‐dimensional pressure‐sensing system that can localize deformation along a long strip and measure its magnitude with an integrated pair of sensors. The sensor system is fabricated with piezoresistive conductive foils and copper sheets encapsulated by adhesive tape with a total thickness of 0.7 mm. For the purpose of demonstration, the sensor is used to monitor the location and magnitude of kink deformation of an inflatable tube. Finite‐element modeling and simulation are conducted to investigate the behavior of the soft sensor system when subjected to kink deformation. The model‐predicted sensor output achieves good agreement with the experimental data for different deformation magnitudes. Finally, extensive experiments on a sensor prototype with dimensions of mounted on an inflatable tube are conducted to demonstrate the capability of the proposed scheme in simultaneous measurement of deformation location and magnitude. It is shown that the specific design approach minimizes the coupling of location and magnitude measurements, resulting in minimal complexity for data processing.

Friendly But Faulty: A Pilot Study on the Perceived Trust of Older Adults in a Social Robot

The efforts to promote ageing-in-place of healthy older adults via cybernetic support are fundamental to avoid possible consequences associated with relocation to facilities, including the loss of social ties and autonomy, and feelings of loneliness. This requires an understanding of key factors that affect the involvement of robots in eldercare and the elderly willingness to embrace the robots&#x2019; domestic use. Trust is argued to be the main foundation of an effective adult-care provider, which might be more significant if such providers are robots. Establishing, and maintaining trust usually involves two main dimensions: 1) the robot&#x2019;s reliability (i.e., performance) and 2) the robot&#x2019;s intrinsic attributes, including its degree of anthropomorphism and benevolence. We conducted a pilot study using a mixed methods approach to explore the extent to which these dimensions and their interaction influenced elderly trust in a humanoid social robot. Using two independent variables, <i>type of attitude</i> (warm, cold) and <i>type of conduct</i> (error, no-error), we aimed to investigate if the older adult participants would trust a purposefully faulty robot when the robot exerted a warm behaviour enhanced with non-functional touch more than a robot that did not, and in what way the robot error affected trust. Lastly, we also investigated the relationship between trust and a proxy variable of actual use of robots (i.e., <i>intention to use robots at home</i>). Given the volatile and context-dependent nature of trust, our close-to real-world scenario of elder-robot interaction involved the administration of health supplements, in which the severity of robot error might have a greater implication on the perceived trust.

Conceptualizing Robotic Agency. Social Robots in Elder Care in Contemporary Japan

Japan is a hyper-aging society, and its government is encouraging robotic solutions to address elder care labor shortage. Therefore, authorities have adopted an agenda of introducing social robots. However, increasing numbers of people in Japan are becoming emotionally attached to anthropomorphic machines, and their introduction into elder care may thus be perceived as contentious. By exploring human engagement with social robots in the care context, this paper argues that rapid technological advances in the twenty-first century will see robots achieve some level of agency, contributing to human society by carving out unique roles for themselves and by bonding with humans. Nevertheless, the questions remain of whether there should be a difference between humans attributing agency to a being and those beings having the inherent ability to produce agency and how we might understand that difference if unable to access the minds of other humans, let alone nonhumans, some of which are not even alive in the classical sense. Using the example of an interaction between an elderly woman and a social robot, we engage with these questions; discuss linguistic, attributed, and inherent agencies; and suggest that a processual type of agency might be most appropriate for understanding human-robot interaction.

Value Sensitive Design to Achieve the UN SDGs with AI: A Case of Elderly Care Robots

Healthcare is becoming increasingly automated with the development and deployment of care robots. There are many benefits to care robots but they also pose many challenging ethical issues. This paper takes care robots for the elderly as the subject of analysis, building on previous literature in the domain of the ethics and design of care robots. Using the value sensitive design (VSD) approach to technology design, this paper extends its application to care robots by integrating the values of care, values that are specific to AI, and higher-scale values such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The ethical issues specific to care robots for the elderly are discussed at length alongside examples of specific design requirements that work to ameliorate these ethical concerns.

Research on Intention Flexible Mapping Algorithm for Elderly Escort Robot

With the development of science and technology and the intensification of the aging of the world’s population, elderly care robots have begun to enter people’s lives. However, the current elderly care system lacks intelligence and is just a simple patchwork of some traditional elderly products, which is not conducive to the needs of the elderly for easy understanding and easy operation. Therefore, this paper proposes a flexible mapping algorithm (FMFD), that is, a gesture can correspond to a flexible mapping of multiple semantics in the same interactive context. First, combine the input gesture with the surrounding environment to establish the current interactive context. Secondly, when the user uses the same gesture to express different semantics, the feature differences formed due to different cognitions are used as the basis to realize the mapping from one gesture to multiple semantics. Finally, four commonly used gestures are designed to demonstrate the results of flexible mapping. Experiments show that compared with the traditional gesture-based human-computer interaction, the proposed flexible mapping scheme greatly reduces the number of gestures that users need to remember, improves the fault tolerance of gestures in the human-computer interaction process, and meets the concept of elderly caregiver robots.

Space Robot Motion Planning Oriented to Autonomous Capture Path

Anthropomorphic robots are an important part of the field of robotics. Controlling the motion of anthropomorphic robots through human movements has important research significance not only for robot control research, but also for robots in national defense, rescue, monitoring, logistics, medical care, elderly care, nursing, and education. There are a wide range of application scenarios in such fields. With the increasing maturity of motion data capture equipment and anthropomorphic robot equipment and the diversity of application environments, traditional anthropomorphic robot control algorithms can no longer meet application requirements. This paper combines Microsoft’s Kinect and Aldebaran’s Nao robot to propose a set of kinematics equation algorithms that fund the capture path to realize the realtime imitation control of human motion by anthropomorphic robots.

A critical analysis of the representations of older adults in the field of human\u2013robot interaction

This paper argues that there is a need to critically assess bias in the representations of older adults in the field of Human–Robot Interaction. This need stems from the recognition that technology development is a socially constructed process that has the potential to reinforce problematic understandings of older adults. Based on a qualitative content analysis of 96 academic publications, this paper indicates that older adults are represented as; frail by default, independent by effort; silent and technologically illiterate; burdensome; and problematic for society. Within these documents, few counternarratives are present that do not take such essentialist representations. In these texts, the goal of social robots in elder care is to “enable” older adults to “better” themselves. The older body is seen as “fixable” with social robots, reinforcing an ageist and neoliberal narrative: older adults are reduced to potential care receivers in ways that shift care responsibilities away from the welfare state onto the individual.

AI-Enabled Elderly Care Robot

The increasing average human age and a growing number of old age population over the globe have emerged the need for automation in the health care domain. Eventually, health care robots will contribute to manage the workload of the care providers in the future health care domain. Elderly people face a major challenge to identify and pronounce names of daily use objects and different family and friends due to dementia-related issues. One of the many tasks by AI-Enabled elderly care humanoid robots will be communication with such patients. They will aid them to remember objects and persons they find difficult to identify and recognize due to dementia. This study has investigated the potential of the JD humanoid robot for object identification in such a scenario. The study has presented a prototype AI-Enabled elderly care robot that can aid elder persons to identify different objects. The robot is trained on ImageNet data set for object identification. Further, a personalized data set comprising of faces of different persons labeled by names of family and friends are also used to train robots for family recognition aid. The JD Humanoid robot captures an image of an object/person and also tracks it as the object/face moves. It identifies input images and outputs in audio format the name of the object/person to guide the elderly person. The third feature of the robot is the notifications of daily routine tasks for elder people like reminders for prayer, exercise walk, and medicine intake. Testing results have shown an object and person identification with 95% accuracy.

Are friends electric? The benefits and risks of human-robot relationships.

SummarySocial robots that can interact and communicate with people are growing in popularity for use at home and in customer-service, education, and healthcare settings. Although growing evidence suggests that co-operative and emotionally aligned social robots could benefit users across the lifespan, controversy continues about the ethical implications of these devices and their potential harms. In this perspective, we explore this balance between benefit and risk through the lens of human-robot relationships. We review the definitions and purposes of social robots, explore their philosophical and psychological status, and relate research on human-human and human-animal relationships to the emerging literature on human-robot relationships. Advocating a relational rather than essentialist view, we consider the balance of benefits and harms that can arise from different types of relationship with social robots and conclude by considering the role of researchers in understanding the ethical and societal impacts of social robotics.

The Effect of the Innovative Characteristics and the Consumer Characteristics of the AI Elderly Care Robot on the Intention to Acceptance

The Effect of the Innovative Characteristics and the Consumer Characteristics of the AI Elderly Care Robot on the Intention to Acceptance

Can robots tackle late-life loneliness? Scanning of future opportunities and challenges in assisted living facilities

This future-oriented study examines the opportunities and challenges offered by social robots and communication technology when aiming to decrease emotional and social loneliness in older people residing in assisted living (AL). The paper draws on prior literature on loneliness, elder care and social robots. The aim is to scan the futures regarding technology support for the frail older people in future AL. The analytical frame was built on Robert Weiss’ division of relational functions: attachment, social integration, opportunity for nurturance, reassurance of worth, sense of reliable alliance, and guidance in stressful situations, and on a distinction between direct and indirect social robots. Our examinations show that social robots could tackle both emotional and social loneliness in assisted living by empowering people to engage in different forms of social interaction inside and outside the facility. However, ethical concerns of objectification, lack of human contact, and deception need to be thoroughly considered when implementing social robots in care for frail older people.

WITHDRAWN: A review on the use of socially assistive robots in education and elderly care

Abstract The emergence of Artificial intelligence over the last decade had never excluded any one of the domains in our daily life. In that socially Assisted Robots (SARs) are indispensable in our activities in future. SARs are one which assists the humans through its behaviour of social interactions, caring and services rather than performing mechanical tasks. Robots are highly dominated in the field of military, space, hospital and banking applications. This article illustrates utilize of SARs in the education for lower level classes and assistance to the old age people. These are the two major areas where serious development to be taken globally because of the population increases. In current scenario, SARs have the promising contributions in both the classroom teachings and assistance to elders. This research reviews the most recent year’s major development in the education system and elderly care. It consolidates the limitation and needs of social robots at present. Socially Assisted Robots have potential to make our lives more sophisticated in future. This review paper also suggests the future research and scope of these robots.

The Development of Elderly Care Robot and Current Challenges for Functional Design

The emergence and development of robot industry is one of the important achievements in the 20th century. After years of development, the elderly care robot can only complete some mobile auxiliary functions at the earliest, and now it can complete many functions such as detection, reminder, chat, etc. Even so, the elderly care robot is still in the direction of more functions and more wisdom. So, what is the function of elderly care robot? What should be paid attention to in the design and use of elderly care robot? Based on the needs of the elderly, this paper discusses the functions of the elderly care robot and the practical factors that the elderly care robot should consider on the premise of meeting the interests of the elderly and not violating the ethics.

The current status of elderly care robots

6年前に「高齢者生活支援ロボットの研究現状調査」（湘南工科大学紀要）をまとめてから現在の間に，人工知能技術の大きな進展によりロボットの画像処理技術やヒューマンインタラクション技術などにおいて出来ることが飛躍的に増している．本論文では前論文以降に研究開発あるいは商品化されたロボットの動向を調査し，まとめた．その結果，技術的には大きな進展がありつつも実用化としてはなかなか期待通り普及しているとまでは至っていないことを実感した．

Control framework for cooperative robots in smart home using bio-inspired neural network

In this paper, we present a model-free tracking controller for a cooperative mobile-manipulators, which are the cornerstone for future smart homes. The mobile-manipulators are common in industries as they are flexible and mobile, and there are several control frameworks for their industrial applications. However, these control algorithms do not consider the unique complex environment of a smart home, which requires a specialized and customized control. For example, elderly care robots in smart homes are not monitored by skilled users in that particular field, as the goals are different in the home environment, so the controller should also be different. The paper is centered around the tracking control problem of the mobile-manipulators to perform tasks individually and cooperatively. We used an optimization-driven approach to formulate an optimization problem that includes our set goals. We then used a zeroing neural network with beetle antennae search (ZNNBAS) algorithm to solve it. ZNNBAS is a nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm inspired by the food searching nature of the beetles. It also incorporates the parallel-processing capability of ZNN, which further enhances the computational power and efficiency of the system. The paper also deals with the theoretical analysis of ZNNBAS and proves that it is stable and convergent. To test our algorithm, we used a simulated model of IIWA14 (KUKA LBR), mounted on the P3-DX mobile platform. We used two mobile-manipulators and tested them in the following scenarios: (1) Robots working independently, (2) Robots working cooperatively. The simulation results show that ZNNBAS was able to accurately and robustly complete the assigned tasks.

Significant challenges when introducing care robots in Swedish elder care

Introduction Care robots are machines, operating partly or completely autonomously, that are intended to assist older people and their caregivers. Care robots are seen as one part of the solution to the aging population, allowing fewer professional caregivers to provide the necessary assistance and care. Despite the potential benefits, the dissemination of care robots, and welfare technology in general, is limited in Swedish elder care. Purpose To explore the challenges of introducing welfare technology, particularly care robots, in elder care. Materials and methods Twenty-one individual interviews with key actors at the societal level, analysed by thematic analysis. Results The challenges, from the societal actors’ perspectives, were related to; the beliefs in technology, attitudes, ethics, collaboration, and the need for knowledge and skills regarding care robots (individual and group challenges). Challenges of a national character were: national governance, infrastructure, laws and regulations, economics, and procurement (systemic and societal challenges). In addition, the necessary preconditions for successful introduction were revealed as: the utility of the technology, implementation, evaluation and safety, security, and integrity (preconditional challenges). Conclusions The introduction of care robots in elder care services seems to be more challenging than that of welfare technology in general, given the context and prevailing attitudes and preconceptions about robotics. Significant challenges need to be managed, at all levels of the society, before care robots can become an integral part of daily care and assist older people and their caregivers in activities and rehabilitation. IMPLICATION FOR REHABILITATION The challenges described by the societal actors‘, are partly similar to those of the end users’, in terms of attitudes, ethics, knowledge and skills, and collaboration. This consensus should provide a solid foundation for the conceptualization and introduction of care robots in elderly care. The challenges follow the pattern of an ecosystem involving all sections of society, which are intertwined and require consideration before the expected benefits can be realised. A user-centred approach is necessary to support the design, implementation, and usefulness of care robots and their suitability for meeting the real needs of older persons and professional caregivers.

Embedding care robots into society and practice: Socio-technical considerations

Robots are not yet typical in daily use in elder care services, but recent studies suggest that they will soon be mainstream. In this study, we focus on the future of elder care, affected by the emergence of care robotics. We tackle the socio-technical transition—a multi-level change with a re-configuration of social and technological elements of the system—of elder care. The transition in the elder care system and the conditions of the embedding the robots in welfare services and society in three European countries, Germany, Sweden and Finland, are examined. Our qualitative study focuses on current situation in the use of robots in elder care as well as advancing and hindering elements in embedding robots into society and elder care practices. According to the results, there is a shift towards using robots in care, but remarkable inertia exists in both technological development and socio-institutional adaptation. Advancing and hindering elements in transition are both technical and social – and increasingly interrelated, which needs to be considered in management and policy measures to promote successful future transition pathways. The change of attitudes and embedding robots into society is promoted, for instance, by raising relevant knowledge on robots at different levels.

Socially Assistive Robots, Older Adults and Research Ethics: The Case for Case-Based Ethics Training

Most studies on socially assistive robots (SARs) in elder care are conducted in care homes and recruit participants with some degree of cognitive impairment. The ethical dimension in these studies thus requires careful attention, suggesting that the researchers involved should be offered specific research ethics training. To meet this need in CARESSES—an international multidisciplinary project that aims to design and evaluate the first culturally competent SAR for the care of older adults—a research ethics training module for the project researchers was developed. The training module is largely based on case-based learning (CBL), a widely recognized approach to learning and instruction that is regarded as highly effective across multiple disciplines. In this paper, we argue that research ethics training should be offered to robotics investigators involved in research on SARs in elder care, and we provide an overview of the ethical issues involved in conducting research with SARs and older adults in care homes. Finally, we show how CBL can be used for research ethics training in this context.