A Novel Auxiliary Excretion Approach to a Lavatory Robot with Safety and Robustness

Abstract

The excretion behavior in daily life for the elderly and the disabled is a high frequency, high physical load, and risky behavior. Therefore, we proposed an auxiliary lavatory robot (ALR) with autonomous movement and self-cleaning capability. When the nursing staff assists a user in transferring from a standing or lying state to sitting on the ALR, the ALR can follow the user according to their position and posture. Over the whole transfer process, the ALR always provides the user with the best transfer position and posture, which is an effective approach to reduce workload and physical load. However, confusion and occlusion of the lower limbs between the nursing staff and the user would affect the user’s posture recognition. First, in this paper, a method combined with object segmentation and shape constraint was proposed to extract the contour of the lower limbs of the user and the nursing staff. Then, depending on the position constraint and dynamic characteristics of the legs contour and back contour of the user, a dynamic posture recognition approach based on a two-level joint probabilistic data association algorithm (JPDA) was proposed. Finally, the leg target recognition experiment, path-tracking experiment, and auxiliary excretion transfer experiment were implemented to verify the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed algorithm. The experimental results showed that our proposed method improved the safety and convenience of the user, and it also reduced the workload and physical load of the nursing staff. The ALR, integrated with the proposed method, has a good universal property for the elderly and disabled with weak motion capability in hospitals, pension centers, and families.

Comparison of the Physical Care Burden on Formal Caregivers between Manual Human Care Using a Paper Diaper and Robot-Aided Care in Excretion Care

“…When the model was applied to the transfer robot, the accuracy for recognition of human joints was higher than before. Zhao et al [16] developed an auxiliary lavatory robot with autonomous movement capability and a comparatively convenient cleaning method for supporting EC. As the experimental results show, the auxiliary lavatory robot could improve the safety and convenience of the user and reduce the physical load of caregivers.…”

“…The second type sent an alert to the care receivers when their bladder was full as a reminder for them to go to the restroom; this type of robot was designed to help older adults who are capable of performing such an ADL on their own but require assistance because of their impaired cognition or incontinence [21]. Finally, the third considered type of robot helped care receivers perform body movements, such as undressing and sitting on a toilet, which care receivers need to perform before using the restroom [16,22].…”