Robotic shopping trolley for supporting the elderly

Abstract

As the advance of an aging society in Japan, along with the lack of caregivers, the elderly care has become a crucial social problem. To cope with this problem, we are focusing on shopping. Shopping is one of the important daily activities and expected to be effective for the elderly rehabilitation because it feels easier than walking rehabilitation and it can give the positive effect for the cognitive functions by memorizing and checking out items to buy. The current shopping rehabilitation is carried out with a caregiver accompanied by the elderly one by one for guiding inside the store, carrying shopping basket, monitoring, etc. Consequently, the caregivers’ load is very high. In this paper, we propose a robotic shopping trolley that can reduce the caregivers’ load in shopping rehabilitation. We evaluate its effectiveness through experiments at an actual supermarket.