Design and evaluation of a telepresence robot for interpersonal communication with older adults

Abstract

Aging is associated with an increased risk of isolation. Interpersonal communication with family members, friends, and caregivers is crucial to healthy aging. This paper presents a telepresence robot "TRiC mini+" which can be used as an agent of the children or caregivers in an older adult's home environment, to duplicate three dimensional face-to-face interpersonal communications. TRiCmini+ can be separated into the "brain (a tablet)" and the "body (the robotic vehicle)". With this structure, the robot control software is an App which can be downloaded, maintained and updated easily through the Internet. TRiC mini+ is integrated with social network services such as Google Talk and Facebook, to provide a wide range of communication and information sharing easily and conveniently. The effectiveness of using TRiCmini+ in communication is evaluated. The results showed that the telepresence performance in both verbal and nonverbal ways is better than the traditional telepresence robot without nonverbal way of interpersonal communication. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.