Toward a Sociable and Dependable Elderly Care Robot: Design, Implementation and User Study

A critical demand for innovation in elderly care, especially in delivering the quality of service to elderlies, arises as many parts of the world are rapidly in transition to an elderly society. The advancement of robotic technologies, especially, in cognitive robotics and sociable human-robot interaction offers a great opportunity for meeting such demand. This paper presents the design and implementation of a next generation of elderly care robot, named as “HomeMate,” based on an innovative undertaking in its sociability and dependability with extensive user studies. The elderlies taken care of by Senior Welfare Centers are chosen as the target sector, for which the following five service scenarios are designed: infotainment, video chatting, game playing, medicine alarm and, in particular, errand services. Unlike conventional approaches, the scenarios are designed here to ensure the overall quality of service by maximizing the synergy under an elderly-caregiver-service robot ecosystem. The unique features implemented in HomeMate include 1) the principle of affordance in appearance design by matching functionality and anthropomorphism indices, 2) the sociability implemented by balancing between autonomy and user controllability as well as by integrating multimodal interactions into HomeMate avatar, and 3) the emphasis on dependability to inspire confidence on HomeMate as a trusted assistant, for which the principle of dependability is proposed and implemented with a cognitive framework. Experiments and user studies strongly support the proposed design principles and verify the dependability in performance.