Effectiveness of social behaviors for autonomous wheelchair robot to support elderly people in Japan.

Journal: PloS one
Published Date: May 20, 2015

Abstract

We developed a wheelchair robot to support the movement of elderly people and specifically implemented two functions to enhance their intention to use it: speaking behavior to convey place/location related information and speed adjustment based on individual preferences. Our study examines how the evaluations of our wheelchair robot differ when compared with human caregivers and a conventional autonomous wheelchair without the two proposed functions in a moving support context. 28 senior citizens participated in the experiment to evaluate three different conditions. Our measurements consisted of questionnaire items and the coding of free-style interview results. Our experimental results revealed that elderly people evaluated our wheelchair robot higher than the wheelchair without the two functions and the human caregivers for some items.

Authors

  • Masahiro Shiomi
    Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, ATR, Kyoto, Japan.
  • Takamasa Iio
    Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, ATR, Kyoto, Japan.
  • Koji Kamei
    Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, ATR, Kyoto, Japan.
  • Chandraprakash Sharma
    Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, ATR, Kyoto, Japan.
  • Norihiro Hagita
    Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, ATR, Kyoto, Japan.

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