Supporting elderly's independent living with a mobile robot platform

With the increased aging population, and declined support from the families, societies will need new tools to ensure the well-being of the elderly. Many of them would prefer living at home, but they will need help and assistance from someone. Technological innovations in the field of robotic systems can be used to enable independent living, to prolong the life of the elderly in their familiar home environments, to maintain the social connections by reducing social isolation and to improve the quality of life in general. In this paper, we present the design and validation of a low-cost mobile robot system that can assist elderly and professional caregivers in everyday activities. The robot structure and its control objectives are described in detail. The developed assistive telepresence robot was tested in simulation and experimentally. On field experiments were conducted in real environment, with potential end users, which is a major advantage of this study. The results of the evaluation were very satisfactory and have shown that participants can operate the robot safely and efficiently. The participants were very satisfied with the performance and features of the robot.