Lessons learned from the deployment of a long-term autonomous robot as companion in physical therapy for older adults with dementia a mixed methods study

Abstract

The eldercare sector is a promising deployment area for robotics where robots can support staff and help to bridge the predicted staff-shortage. A requirement analysis showed that one field of robot-deployment could be supporting physical therapy of older adults with advanced dementia. To explore this possibility, a long-term autonomous robot was deployed as a walking group assistant at a care site for the first time. The robot accompanied two weekly walking groups for a month, offering visual and acoustic stimulation. Therapists' experience, the robot's influence on the dynamic of the group and the therapists' estimation of the robot's utility were assessed by a mixed methods design consisting of observations, interviews and rating scales. Findings suggest that a robot has the potential to enhance motivation, group coherence and also mood within the walking group. Furthermore, older adults show curiosity and openness towards the robot. However, robustness and reliability of the system must be high, otherwise technical problems quickly turn the robot from a useful assistant into a source of additional workload and exhaustion for therapists

To Explore or to Exploit? Learning Humans’ Behaviour to Maximize Interactions with Them

“…6 Deployment at a care site mobile robot at the "Haus der Barmherzigkeit", an elder care facility in Austria [7,5]. The robot was autonomously navigated in the environment consisting of 12 nodes (see Fig.…”

The MuMMER Project: Engaging Human-Robot Interaction in Real-World Public Spaces

“…The results of this long-term study will serve to finalise the use cases and success metrics developed during the project, and will also provide a concrete demonstration of the utility, flexibility, and generalisability of the robot system developed in MuMMER. As mentioned at the start of this paper, this sort of long-term, public-space deployment has only recently begun to be addressed (e.g., [9,19]), and not very widely outside of Japan. The results of the MuMMER long-term deployment should therefore add significantly to our knowledge of how such robots are received and accepted in public spaces around Europe.…”

“…In post-experiment questionnaires, the robot was highly rated on most subjective measures, with many positive comments. Outside Japan, other successful locations for public robot deployment have included museums [12], city centres [3,20], care homes [9], and airports [19].…”

An HRI Graduate Course for Exposing Technologists to the Importance of Considering Social Aspects of Technology

“…Work also investigates public opinions of robots in various contexts (Sundar, Waddell, & Jung, 2016), how people will interact with the technology (Robinette, Li, Allen, Howard, & Wagner, 2016), and how the technology will integrate into people's spaces (Hebesberger, Dondrup, Koertner, Gisinger, & Pripfl, 2016), for the purposes of informing technology design.…”