PFI-TT: Affordable Daily Activity Assistive Robots for Individualized Elderly Care in Community Based Long-term Care Centers

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this PFI project addresses the healthcare crisis of the growing elderly population coupled with low birth rates where the number of older adults is outgrowing the number of working-age adults to care for them. With the scarcity of care options available, robots are a welcome solution for assisting elders with small tasks that would normally be done by a caregiver. These robots would serve in an estimated 17,000 elder care facilities nationwide. Robots will be able to identify elders and personalize their assistance while monitoring health parameters. Critically, this work will aim to understand how a robot capable of assistance in simple activities of daily living should behave to aid elders in a community long term care setting including the acceptance and willingness to receive assistance from the robot.The proposed project addresses three research areas: 1) Robot Design for Elderly: How can we develop a useful affordable robot system for the elder-care community? What is the elder-care community preference for humanoid robot forms over non-humanoid in a robot that provides assistance? 2) Robot Behavior for Elderly: How will the elderly react to an autonomous robot that can recognize individuals, call them by name and provide services? What effects will different designs have on the interaction such as form-factor, motions, expressiveness and modalities of interaction? 3) Robotic Health Tracking of Elderly: As interactions with the robot occur in social settings, the robot can log data such as requests for water delivery from the robot, distance walked by the elders etc. What factors affect the quality of data can be obtained and how useful will this data be to clinicians? These questions will be answered by building a low cost robot using a variety of technologies developed from NSF-funded programs, then validating the performance with tests in an elder-care facility.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.