Designing for Caregiving: Integrating Robotic Assistance in Senior Living Communities

TL;DR

This paper explores how robotic assistance can be integrated into senior care by studying caregiver workflows and designing robots that support their needs, focusing on practical implementation in living communities.

Contribution

It provides a novel ethnographic and co-design approach to understanding caregiver workflows and offers design opportunities for robotic assistance tailored to senior living environments.

Findings

Identified key caregiver workflows and challenges.

Developed design opportunities for robotic integration.

Proposed feedback mechanisms for stakeholders.

Abstract

Robots hold significant promise to assist with providing care to an aging population and to help overcome increasing caregiver demands. Although a large body of research has explored robotic assistance for individuals with disabilities and age-related challenges, this past work focuses primarily on building robotic capabilities for assistance and has not yet fully considered how these capabilities could be used by professional caregivers. To better understand the workflows and practices of caregivers who support aging populations and to determine how robotic assistance can be integrated into their work, we conducted a field study using ethnographic and co-design methods in a senior living community. From our results, we created a set of design opportunities for robotic assistance, which we organized into three different parts: supporting caregiver workflows, adapting to resident abilities, and providing feedback to all stakeholders of the interaction.