Investigation of Practical Use of Humanoid Robots in Elderly Care Centres

Abstract

The global trend of population ageing has magnified the shortage of qualified staff in the elderly care industry. This study evaluates the feasibility and user experience of introducing robots in elderly care services. A robot instructor was being benchmarked against a human instructor administering two types of activities with 41 elderly participants. The results show that robot was more effective and better preferred by users over human instructor on instructing physical exercise, while reaching similar level of effectiveness and user acceptance on information delivery. Additionally, user perception of robots improved after the robot experiment session. These findings could be useful for future design of robots for elderly users and for social robots in general.