Practical use of a remote movable avatar robot with an immersive interface for seniors

Abstract

Societal aging is an inevitable social problem in many developed countries. In order to manage this issue, it is necessary to drastically change the welfare security and labor system of relevant societies. We have proposed "mosaic-type work" in which a single "virtual worker" is synthesized based on individual workers and seniors through seamless information sharing. In this paper, we specifically focus on the spatial part of the mosaic, namely, the "spatial mosaic," for enabling seniors to work without the burden of movement. Towards the actualization of this concept, we aimed to develop senior-friendly mobile avatar robots that can fit into seniors' daily lives. First, we analyzed problems of seniors' telecommunication with telepresence robots, and two elemental interfaces, the "physically operable interface" and the "acoustic zooming interface." The former is a senior-friendly interface that the seniors can manipulate with their motion, and the latter enables the user to listen to sounds in a specified area that the user can adjust. In order to discuss integrated interface designs, we conducted two exploratory experiments to evaluate the performance of these systems. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.