Design of a Kiosk Type Healthcare Robot System for Older People in Private and Public Places

In this paper, we introduce a healthcare robot system for older people and its experiments in private and public spaces. We designed a healthcare robot system and healthcare functionalities, and conducted a long-term study in a real environment. Our healthcare robot system consists of three parts: a kiosk type service robot platform, a healthcare software system with healthcare service modules, and a medical server system. 1) The kiosk type service robot platform is used for giving helpful information to older people through a touch screen. 2) The healthcare software system is designed to enable easy modification of healthcare service modules according to the purpose of the robot. 3) The medical server system stores health information of older people for managing their health conditions. For validating our software design and implementation in real environments, we deployed this healthcare robot system in private and public places of a retirement village. In these experiments, older people interacted with the robots and used healthcare functionalities for over 12 weeks. During the experiments, the robots sent records of the interactions to our medical server. The server provides this information to clinicians who are supervising the older peoples’ health status. When the experiments were completed, the participants completed questionnaires. The results showed that older people in private places used the healthcare service for checking their health conditions, and older people in public places like to use the entertainment services. We confirmed that our kiosk type robot can help older people as well.