What to Do Next? An Activity Scheduling Schema for Social Assistance Robots for Older Adults.

Due to an aging population, stressed caregivers within a stressed care sector as well as the wish of aging at home, there is an urgent need to provide solutions to cope with these challenges today and in the future. Finding technological, i.e., robotic, solutions is an interesting approach and is a highly frequented research topic. However, engineering social assistance robots (SARs) to a satisfying degree of usability and technology acceptance is challenging, because fulfilling user’s expectations – especially with older adults as key user group – means to implement naturally-feeling robotic behaviour which leads to emulate a semi-human-like task execution behaviour. Within our work, we addressed the scheduling of robotic activities based on aspects such as parallelisability for multi-task execution, user- and system-triggered commands, as well as task priorities to allow interruption or stopping of running activities or dismissing incoming commands. We assessed user’s expectations within a survey-based requirements analysis and derived a decision-making concept for scheduling incoming activities. We implemented the concept within a small app to evaluate the schema according to the acceptance of the resulting robotic behaviour. With this concept, we set a starting point to engineering well-accepted SARs from a behavioural perspective next to the finally implemented use cases and specific situations to use a SAR in the environment of older adults. This is crucial to move towards accepted technological solutions to the social challenges mentioned above that arise with an aging population.