Using an off-the-shelf platform to develop a gender-sensitive health care robot for older adults and chronically ill people

Abstract

Social robots are often envisioned as companions for older adults and chronically ill people to support them in everyday life (taking medication, staying physically active, etc.). For all these tasks a high-level of personalization is required, in order to achieve satisfying support as well as a high degree of engagement to motivate people to continue a healthy lifestyle. In the Austrian project RoboGen, we wanted to achieve exactly that. Using an off-the-shelf low-cost robotic platform (Q.bo One), we extended it with a learning agent and designed the interaction in a gender-sensitive way. In this brief communication we present the evaluation results derived from a case study with potential users and semi-structured interviews with experts. Our results show the challenges that come with off-the-shelf robotic platforms and usability (speech recognition, text-to-speech output etc.), also highlight the perception of the potential users as well as how experts rated the concept.