Enabling personalised medical support for chronic disease management through a hybrid robot-cloud approach

Abstract

Information and Communication Technology and personal robots could play a fundamental role in efficiently managing chronic diseases and avoiding improper medications. They could support senior citizens with reminders, thus promoting their independent living and quality of life, especially in the presence of several chronic diseases (multimorbidity). In this context, this article proposes a service model for personalised medical support that is able to provide adequate healthcare service by means of a hybrid robot-cloud approach. This service was quantitatively and qualitatively tested to assess the technical feasibility and user acceptability level of the service. The service was tested with 23 older people (65-86 years) in the DomoCasa Lab (Italy). This study demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed hybrid cloud solution and the usability and acceptability were positively evaluated thus confirming the ability to utilise these innovative technologies for active and healthy ageing.

Emotion Modelling for Social Robotics Applications: A Review

“…According to recent statistics [1] , robots have become more common in our daily life. In a not too distant future, robots will concretely share environments with human beings to actively collaborate with them in specific daily tasks, such as, for example, the management of daily activities [2] , the promotion of social inclusion [3] and the suggestion of healthy activities [4] . As social robots need to work closely with humans, they are expected to interact and communicate with them by embodying human social behaviours and rules and to have high levels of acceptability in providing useful and efficient services [5] .…”

A Survey of Behavioral Models for Social Robots

“…Consequently, in the near future, robots will concretely share environments with human beings to actively collaborate with them in specific daily tasks. The presence of a robot, in fact, could be a useful support during the management of daily activities [6,7], the promotion of social inclusion [8,9], and the suggestion of healthy activities [10,11]. Particularly, recent literature findings underline that robots could help users in their daily life by bringing them objects that they need ( i.e., a bottle of water, a specific drug ) [12], which helps them in dressing tasks [13,14] or in getting in contact with their families or authorities in dangerous situations [9].…”

ACCRA Project: Agile Co-Creation for Robots and Aging

“…In this context, over the last years, several EU projects have been founded to design, develop and test robotic solutions that could support elderly people and stakeholders in daily life tasks. Within these projects, different robotic platform are customized and tested with real older users to estimate the usability and the acceptability level of the proposed services [15][16] [ 17]. For instance, Teresa and Giraff+ projects use Giraff robots; Robot-Era and Astromobile projects customize SCITOS G5 with a co-design approach with end-users.…”