Robotics in assisted eldercare to maintain mental and emotional wellbeing of older adults

• Main Author: Seah, Wei Hong
• Other Authors: Vanessa Evers
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2022
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Hardware; Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computer applications
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/157326
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the rapid growth of the ageing population, more and more people experience problems that are age-related such as those that affect their mental, emotional, and social wellbeing. As a result, elderly persons need elder-care assistance to receive time-sensitive interventions, support, and assistance due to the inability to perform daily tasks independently because of physical frailty. Deteriorating physical and cognitive abilities can reduce life satisfaction, leading to mental health problems, and a sense of loneliness. As ageing populations become more independent, robotics is emerging as a potential way to help and support their independence. An age-friendly social robot would improve older people's emotional and mental wellbeing tremendously. It is important to explore the areas of home-based eldercare interventions with a general platform to attack the problem of intergenerational connectivity. The aim of this project is to innovate and implement a user-friendly social robot with the intervention to enable social connections between elderly and younger people by leveraging social medial content. This can help elderly people to connect with their loved ones as more people in the younger generation use social media such as Instagram to post about their daily life. The social robot also explored opportunities to support physical exercise interventions by developing an interface that requires large arm or wrist movements to illustrate the potential for administering a variety of interventions with the platform, without the hassle of adapting to digital learning. Moreover, the gesture feature can also control the robot movement to bring interaction with the social robot and the elderly user. This project consists of 2 sections, a wearable device comprising an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense that will be worn by the elderly user to allow them to have the capability to use the gesture features on the social robot, and the main body of the social robot comprising Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with a LCD touchscreen display to show the photos or videos, and an Arduino UNO WiFI Rev 2 with encoder motors to move the social robot. An ergonomic wrist strap is part of the design of the wearable device, which is comfortable, light, and easy to wear. As for the social robot, it is constructed from 3D printing and acrylic sheet with safety concerns considered. The challenges faced in realising a general platform for interventions was the innovation of ideas that must be practicable, social constraints of the robot with interaction design, and the consideration of physical appearance with an on-screen interface.