Encouraging daily healthcare habit with communication robots

Abstract

It is important for elderly people to be involved in local community to reduce the risk of being isolated. The authors are building a framework with communication robots for encouraging elderly people to participate in more social activities by providing local news that may be interesting. Since physical soundness is also essential for people to participate in such activities, self-monitoring of physical conditions are involved into the framework. A robot- guided interaction system is developed based on the framework so that a robot encourages the user to measure weight and blood pressure daily. The efficiency is estimated by an experiment. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.