Engineering news
Researchers are to investigate if robots are capable of living with elderly people in order to assist them with everyday tasks normally fulfilled by a carer.
The £3 million European Enrichme project involves a consortium of Universities and care homes, including the University of Lincoln in the UK, and will develop ways of integrating service robots with so-called “smart homes”.
Smart homes incorporate advanced automation systems to provide inhabitants with monitoring and control functions. The project plans for these robots to integrate with these functions and monitoring, enabling people with mild cognitive impairments, such as early dementia, to live more independently, and the robots will also help with activities that can improve quality of life, such as exercise and social visits. They will also provide round-the-clock feedback to carers and health professionals.
Principal Investigator, Dr Nicola Bellotto from the University of Lincoln, said: “There will be an intelligent interactive robot that is integrated with a smarthome, communicating with a network of care givers and relatives. The system will build on recent advances in mobile service robotics and ambient assisted living to help people improve health and wellbeing.
The project will include a “large-scale” evaluation where robots will be deployed within the extra-care homes of LACE Housing Association in the UK, to care homes in Greece and to elderly people’s own homes in Poland, for one year.
The robots will also monitor for sudden changes in mood which might indicate deterioration, or the need for family or health services to step in. Dr Bellotto said: “If the robot detects that the mood of the person is particularly low, it might suggest some kind of game or interaction with relatives. It could record information on how the mood changes and provide professional staff with feedback over a period of time, which would be very useful when studying the evolution of particular cognitive impairments.”
The robots will also be programmed to identify individual people in order to provide personalised services for elderly people living with others. New research in the field of adaptive human-robot interaction (HRI) will provide tools for the robots to support cognitive stimulation and social inclusion, which improve over time by learning from and adapting to the state of the user.
Hazel Ashmore, Project Lead Officer for LACE Housing, said: “This is an exciting opportunity to explore the potential benefits of assistive technology, particularly the introduction of robots in this case, to complement our usual operations.”