This Partnership For Innovation project develops and tests the use of service robots to monitor and improve health of the elderly. The growing elderly population coupled with low birth rates in the developed world is creating a crisis in healthcare. The number of senior citizens is outgrowing the number of working-age adults to care for them. In the U.S. alone, the number of seniors over age 65 is projected to double from year 2000 to 2030, reaching 71.5 million. With the scarcity of care options available, affordable robots are a welcome solution for assisting elders with small tasks that would normally be done by a caregiver. While helping elders with activities of daily living in an elder care facility, the system learns about them. It can then do things such as help ensure that they are eating or drinking healthily.
The project consists of two main parts: development of a low-cost mobile manipulator capable of a limited set of elder-relevant manipulation tasks (e.g., picking up dropped items or filling a water glass); and development of a data-driven service system that analyzes the use of the robot over time to monitor elder health via service requests and pro-actively offer assistance as needed. One key to making this system viable is maintaining effectiveness at low cost. This work builds on a commercial low-cost mobile robot platform being developed at Savioke and adds manipulation capabilities via a novel low-cost expanding prismatic joint arm under development at the University of Pennsylvania. This mobile manipulator robot will be used to perform service tasks, such as delivering water to elders. The data gathered by these robots and how elders use them in the field will provide information about how robots can help create a larger data-driven health monitoring system.
The partners at the inception of the project include University of Pennsylvania, both the School of Engineering and Applied Science as well as the School of Medicine (Philadelphia, PA) and Savioke (Sunnyvale, CA, a small business concern) along with broader context partner, "LIFE"--Living Independently For Elders (Philadelphia, PA, a non-profit organization).
