User-friendly autonomous wheelchair for elderly care using ubiquitous network robot platform

The importance of assistive robots for elderly people is increasing to match the needs of rapidly aging world societies. This paper develops a wheelchair robot to support the movement of the elderly to decrease caregiver workloads from the perspective of physical load and time consumption. We observed the behaviors of caregivers at a private residential care home when they are wheeling elderly people in wheelchairs. The behavior includes appropriate utterances for reducing the anxieties of senior citizens based on properties of place, e.g., "Here the path is a little narrow" while passing a narrow space or "Now let's go into elevator." They also adjusted to the wheeling speed preference of each individual because their preferred speeds were different. We implemented these two functions for elderly care using the Ubiquitous Network Robot Platform that allows the management of users and environment properties. Experimental results with elderly participants at a pseudo resident home show that the seniors prefer a wheelchair robot on which the above functions have been implemented.