International Study on Life Support Devices for the Elderly

今天，我们的社会老龄化是世界上最重要的话题之一。本研究在北美、欧洲和中国等地进行了老年人生活保障技术的国际调查，以明确合适的国际合作方式。在医学工程领域，微创手术是最热门的话题。许多国家在医学图像、光学显微镜、手术规划和手术机器人的应用方面进行了大量的研究。我们发现，在对这类手术机器人进行临床评估时，需要制定避免事故的指南。在康复工程领域，康复机器人是最受期待的领域之一。此外，研究人员还研究了多媒体通信在支持老年人和残疾人居家生活方面的应用。虽然虚拟现实是一种新的可用技术，但已经进行了几项研究，以激励残疾儿童进行康复计划。我们发现，需求分析对于开发真正有效的产品具有重要意义。为了提供合适的产品，我们需要评估用户的生活质量。由于没有既定的评估方法，北欧国家对这一主题的研究一直在专门进行。日本人的生活方式明显不同于欧洲人的生活方式，我们必须研究自己的方法来评估生活质量。我们得出的结论是：最重要的关键技术是机器人技术。在这一领域，日本未来可以为国际合作做出巨大贡献。在产品开发中，应充分考虑安全性。为了实现安全，需要进行标准化工作，而日本必须是这项工作中最活跃的国家。

Today the aging of our society is one of the most important topics in the world. In this study, international survey on technologies to support the life and living of elderly people had been done, to clarify appropriate ways of international cooperation.The survey had been done in the North America, Europe and China. In medical engineering field, less/minimum invasive surgery was the most hot topic. Great number of studies had been done in many countries on application of medical images, optical scopes, surgical planning and surgical robots. We found that it was needed to establish the guidelines to avoid accidents in clinical evaluation of such surgical robots.In the field of rehabilitation engineering, rehabilitation robotics was one of the most expected areas. In addition, researchers had studied on application of multimedia communication to support elderly and disabled people living in their own home. Though virtual reality was newly available technology, several studies had done to motivate disabled children to perform their rehabilitation program. What we found was the great significance of needs analysis to develop products which were truly effective. To deliver appropriate products, we need to evaluate the quality of life of the user. Since there were no established methods to evaluate, researches on this topic had been doing specially in Nordic countries. We must study our own method to evaluate the quality of life in the Japanese life style which is apparently different from European ones.We concluded as follows ; the most important key technology is robotics. In this field, Japan can contribute greatly to international cooperation in the future. In development of products, safety should be considered sufficiently. To achieve safety, standardization work would be needed and Japan must be the most active country in the work.