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Title: Co-designing Technologies for Well Being: A Robot Companion for Older Adults
Robotics is an industry that has disrupted the health field in different areas, including older adult care. Robotic companions for older adults have proved to produce many benefits, including decreasing loneliness, anxiety, stress, depression, agitation, and contributing to the improvement of social relationships, to mention a few. Currently, there are different options in the market of robotic pets for the older adult population. Among them is the Joy for All line of products. In December of 2015, Hasbro released the Joy for All - Robotic Cat to the market. While the product has been successfully adopted by the older adult population, there are opportunities to improve the nature of advanced human-robot interaction. The class, Technologies to Extend Life, taught in the Master of Design program at the University of Cincinnati, focused on designing the next generation of Joy for All robotic intelligence that could provide psycho-social support for older adults. With this project, the class had two primary objectives: 1) Understand the real challenges older adults face in activities of daily living; and 2) Develop innovative hardware and software tools that can meet some of the identified daily challenges. The class had a co-design approach in the many phases that included different participants (older adults and caregivers), utilizing a variety of tools to assess, analyze, develop, design, implement, and evaluate the interventions with older adults and communities. The significance of this project is to use a participatory approach to assess and analyze the challenges older adults face in activities of daily living that robotic companions may help alleviate, thus having an empathic perspective to the creation of assistive technologies.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1717701
PAR ID:
10282375
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Editor(s):
Arai, K.
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 2021 Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC)
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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