Hobbit: Providing Fall Detection and Prevention for the Elderly in the Real World

Abstract

We present the robot developed within the Hobbit project, a socially assistive service robot aiming at the challenge of enabling prolonged independent living of elderly people in their own homes. We present the second prototype (Hobbit PT2) in terms of hardware and functionality improvements following first user studies. Our main contribution lies within the description of all components developed within the Hobbit project, leading to autonomous operation of 371 days during field trials in Austria, Greece, and Sweden. In these field trials, we studied how 18 elderly users (aged 75 years and older) lived with the autonomously interacting service robot over multiple weeks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a multifunctional, low-cost service robot equipped with a manipulator was studied and evaluated for several weeks under real-world conditions. We show that Hobbit’s adaptive approach towards the user increasingly eased the interaction between the users and Hobbit. We provide lessons learned regarding the need for adaptive behavior coordination, support during emergency situations, and clear communication of robotic actions and their consequences for fellow researchers who are developing an autonomous, low-cost service robot designed to interact with their users in domestic contexts. Our trials show the necessity to move out into actual user homes, as only there can we encounter issues such as misinterpretation of actions during unscripted human-robot interaction.

9 Assistive robots in care: Expectations and perceptions of older people

“…Another crucial area to prolong the independent life of the older people is fall detection (Webster and Celik 2014). New technologies eliminate former deficiencies, including older people being incapable of using safety-alarm buttons in the case of falling or forgetting to wear support devices (Bajones et al 2018).…”

Results of Field Trials with a Mobile Service Robot for Older Adults in 16 Private Households

“…The discussed work shows a common trade-off between the duration of the study and the complexity of the robot. When the complexity and the number of available functionalities of the robot increased, trade-offs had to be made in the study design, such as (1) reducing the interaction's duration to a few hours (sometimes split over multiple days), (2) carrying out the studies in custom set-up living laboratories, (3) providing a rather small set of functionalities on the robot, (4) reducing the autonomy of the robot, or (5) a combination.…”

“…Figure 3 shows two use-cases of the MMUI. More details about the technical implementation of Hobbit are presented in References [2,40].…”

“…Hobbit was placed in the private home of older adults, living by themselves, where the participants could interact with the robot on a 24/7 basis. The overall evaluation goal was to assess the Human-Robot-Interaction with Hobbit in terms of usability, user acceptance, and affordability (for space reasons, we only report on usability and user acceptance in this manuscript; see References [2,44] for details). Therefore, an evaluation plan was needed, which we understood as the overall methodological concept for the household trials; it described the overall research questions, applied methods, and the timeline for conduction.…”

“…The problem of an aging society sparks the need for technological advances that could enable social service robots to advance in elderly care tasks. Different companies and research teams provide robots for the goal of improved health care such as, e.g., Giraff, 1 Care-O-Bot, 2 and Kompai. 3 Studies on needs and expectations of older adults towards socially assistive robots [4] indicate that people expect robots to help with household chores (cleaning the kitchen, bath, and toilet), lifting heavy objects, and reaching for, picking up, and delivering objects.…”