Human-Robot Interaction in Health Care Automation

Abstract

Robot-based assistance systems are widely utilized in industrial production today. In the near future, the numbers of applications in private households as well as in health care are also expected to grow. Such systems need to act and react autonomously, to cooperate and to perform supportive functions. This paper starts with the description of a project of a specially developed humanoid care robot and focusses on the lessons learned from this project. Afterwards, concepts and ideas of industrial human-robot interaction will be presented and discussed with regard to the special requirements in health care automation, such as safety and human factors. Finally, a new full-scope simulation system will be introduced, which should allow experiments on Situation Awareness and usability with experiments with probands under constant environmental conditions.