What do staff in eldercare want a robot for? An assessment of potential tasks and user requirements for a long-term deployment

Robotic aids could help to overcome the gap between rising numbers of older adults and at the same time declining numbers of care staff. Assessments of end-user requirements, especially focusing on staff in eldercare facilities are still sparse. Contributing to this field of research this study presents end-user requirements and task analysis gained from a methodological combination of interviews and focus group discussions. The findings suggest different tasks robots in eldercare could engage in such as “fetch and carry” tasks, specific entertainment and information tasks, support in physical and occupational therapy, and in security. Furthermore this paper presents an iterative approach that closes the loop between requirements-assessments and subsequent implementations that follow the found requirements

Results of Field Trials with a Mobile Service Robot for Older Adults in 16 Private Households

In this article, we present results obtained from field trials with the Hobbit robotic platform, an assistive, social service robot aiming at enabling prolonged independent living of older adults in their own homes. Our main contribution lies within the detailed results on perceived safety, usability, and acceptance from field trials with autonomous robots in real homes of older users. In these field trials, we studied how 16 older adults (75 plus) lived with autonomously interacting service robots over multiple week

Hobbit: Providing Fall Detection and Prevention for the Elderly in the Real World

We present the robot developed within the Hobbit project, a socially assistive service robot aiming at the challenge of enabling prolonged independent living of elderly people in their own homes. We present the second prototype (Hobbit PT2) in terms of hardware and functionality improvements following first user studies. Our main contribution lies within the description of all components developed within the Hobbit project, leading to autonomous operation of 371 days during field trials in Austria, Greece, and Sweden. In these field trials, we studied how 18 elderly users (aged 75 years and older) lived with the autonomously interacting service robot over multiple weeks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a multifunctional, low-cost service robot equipped with a manipulator was studied and evaluated for several weeks under real-world conditions. We show that Hobbit’s adaptive approach towards the user increasingly eased the interaction between the users and Hobbit. We provide lessons learned regarding the need for adaptive behavior coordination, support during emergency situations, and clear communication of robotic actions and their consequences for fellow researchers who are developing an autonomous, low-cost service robot designed to interact with their users in domestic contexts. Our trials show the necessity to move out into actual user homes, as only there can we encounter issues such as misinterpretation of actions during unscripted human-robot interaction