An interactive robot for reminding medication to older people

Abstract

The demonstration in the presented video shows the outcome of interdisciplinary research done by the Robotics Research Group (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering), the School of Population Health and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland, to develop an interactive health care assistant robot. The research aims to design human robot interaction towards automated medication support for older people [3], [4]. In the current design, the older people are guided by a Stationary Robotic Medication Management System (StRoMMS) while they take their daily medications in their independent living quarters in a retirement village. We performed a pilot user study to evaluate the hypothesized technological requirements of the robotic system as well as the clinical workflow requirements [1] taking into account the health care context. The demonstration shows a snapshot of the interaction for the main medication dialog that the older person undergoes. There are multiple interactions in a day for multiple types of medication scheduled at multiple times. We also show some features of the workflow that ensure any errors are reported in real-time, as well as a feature that ensures the medication regime can be monitored by the health care providers remotely [2] in real-time. The robot also has capabilities to engage the older people by singing and dancing with entertainment content they prefer. Qualitative results from the research is presented in the video and informed a bigger field trial in New Zealand.