Aging and Health Research (Jun 2022)

Using an off-the-shelf platform to develop a gender-sensitive health care robot for older adults and chronically ill people

  • Yvonne Prinzellner,
  • Nadine Sturm,
  • Constanze Geyer,
  • Gabriele Salomon,
  • Astrid Weiss,
  • Sabine Zauchner,
  • Manuela Plößnig,
  • Oliver Jung

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2, no. 2
p. 100072

Abstract

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Social robots are often envisioned as companions for older adults and chronically ill people to support them in everyday life (taking medication, staying physically active, etc.). For all these tasks a high-level of personalization is required, in order to achieve satisfying support as well as a high degree of engagement to motivate people to continue a healthy lifestyle. In the Austrian project RoboGen, we wanted to achieve exactly that. Using an off-the-shelf low-cost robotic platform (Q.bo One), we extended it with a learning agent and designed the interaction in a gender-sensitive way. In this brief communication we present the evaluation results derived from a case study with potential users and semi-structured interviews with experts. Our results show the challenges that come with off-the-shelf robotic platforms and usability (speech recognition, text-to-speech output etc.), also highlight the perception of the potential users as well as how experts rated the concept.

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