Frailty Care Robot for Elderly and Its Application for Physical and Psychological Support

TL;DR

This paper introduces AHOBO, a care robot designed for elderly support at home, providing physical health monitoring and psychological engagement, with positive usability evaluations indicating its potential for continuous daily use.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel frailty care robot, AHOBO, integrating blood pressure measurement and recreational activities, demonstrating its usability for continuous elderly support in daily life.

Findings

Blood pressure readings unaffected by robot interaction

Elderly found the system easy to use and acceptable

Recreational coloring activity feasible for daily psychological support

Abstract

To achieve continuous frail care in the daily lives of the elderly, we propose AHOBO, a frail care robot for the elderly at home. Two types of support systems by AHOBO were implemented to support the elderly in both physical health and psychological aspects. For physical health frailty care, we focused on blood pressure and developed a support system for blood pressure measurement with AHOBO. For psychological frailty care, we implemented reminiscent coloring with the AHOBO as a recreational activity with the robot. The usability of the system was evaluated based on the assumption of continuous use in daily life. For the support system in blood pressure measurement, we performed a qualitative evaluation using a questionnaire for 16 subjects, including elderly people under blood pressure measurement by the system. The results confirmed that the proposed robot does not affect the blood pressure readings and is acceptable in terms of ease of use based on subjective evaluation. For the reminiscent coloring interaction, a subjective evaluation was conducted on two elderly people under the verbal fluency task, and it has been confirmed that the interaction can be used continuously in daily life. The widespread use of the proposed robot as an interface for AI that supports daily life will lead to a society in which AI robots support people from the cradle to the grave.