Assistive robots for the elderly: Innovative tools to gather health relevant data

Abstract

Robots can be key players in the healthcare digital revolution that is underway. More specifically, assistive robots are going to profoundly affect the way healthcare is delivered. In the research and commercial field, robotic technologies have been used for physical and cognitive rehabilitation, surgery, telemedicine, drug delivery, and patient management. Robots are currently used across a range of environments, including hospitals, homes, schools, and nursing homes. Healthcare robotics is an exciting, emerging area that can benefit all stakeholders across a wide range of settings. The objective of this chapter is to investigate how this can happen given the current state of the art in the field. We will focus our argument on how they can be used as valuable agents for the acquisition of novel data, relevant to the healthcare and well-being domain.