A Health Promotion Support System for Increasing Motivation Using a Robot Partner

Abstract

This paper proposes a system for improving daily lives of elderly people to ensure health, which we termed as “health promotion support system”. In order to realize an enriched life style among elderly people, daily health care is important. Therefore, we propose a system where robot partners will assist in exercising activity among elderly people. This system is intended to provide encouragement,exercise guidance and exercise evaluation to motivate voluntary and active participation from the elderly through the help of robot partner. The robot partner presents appropriate comment based on the score using calculated information from quantitative evaluation of the measured data. Elderly people can get a good evaluation by raising their intrinsic motivation. In addition, elderly people’s self-efficacy can be improved using encouraging speech from robot partner. Finally, we consider the element of communication to support voluntary participation based on survey results from elderly people and caregiver.