Teleoperation of Collaborative Robot for Remote Dementia Care in Home Environments

Abstract

As a senile chronic, progressive and currently incurable disease, dementia has an enormous impact on society and life quality of the elderly. The development of teleoperation technology has changed the traditional way of care delivery and brought a variety of novel applications for dementia care. In this paper, a telerobotic system is presented which gives the caregivers the capability of assisting dementia elderly remotely. The proposed system is composed of a dual-arm collaborative robot (YuMi) and a wearable motion capture device. The communication architecture is achieved by the robot operation system (ROS). The position-orientation data of the operator's hand are obtained and used to control the YuMi robot. Besides, a path-constrained mapping method is designed for motion trajectory tracking between the robot and the operator in the progress of teleoperation. Meanwhile, corresponding experiments are conducted to verify the performance of the trajectory tracking using the path-constrained mapping method. Results show that the position tracking deviation between the trajectory of the operator and the robot measured by dynamic time warping distance is 1.05 mm at the sampling frequency of 7.5 Hz. Moreover, the practicability of the proposed system was verified by teleoperating the YuMi robot to pick up a medicine bottle and further demonstrated by assisting an elderly woman in picking up a cup remotely. The proposed telerobotic system has potential utility for improving the life quality of dementia elderly and the care effect of their caregivers.

Review of Robot Skin: A Potential Enabler for Safe Collaboration, Immersive Teleoperation, and Affective Interaction of Future Collaborative Robots

“…Driven by the advanced technologies of Healthcare 4.0, the shift of healthcare from hospital to improvised hospital, community, and home is happening through remote monitoring of health status and remote delivery of interventions and treatment [24], [23]. Under this shift, telerobotics can be potentially used to undertake human care, especially the home care of the elderly [30], [31] and the patient care of an infectious disease pandemic [32], as shown in Figure 3. This is the explicit system architecture of telerobotics, which is illustrated by the field investigation mentioned in Section II.A, indicating the exchanged information in the closed-loop remote control.…”

Assessing the Role of Gaze Tracking in Optimizing Humans-In-The-Loop Telerobotic Operation Using Multimodal Feedback

“…One of the functions of assistive robots is helping the elderly and people living with disabilities with their activities in daily life ( Begum et al, 2013 ) ( Góngora Alonso et al, 2019 ). Assistive robots that are designed to perform more diverse tasks also encourage greater collaboration with humans, particularly in terms of social interaction which helps to build trust and empathy ( Langer et al, 2019 ) ( Lv et al, 2020 ) ( Begum et al, 2015 ). The need for social interaction and the unpredictable nature of living environments makes a case for the introduction of teleoperated assistive robots ( Bolarinwa et al, 2019 ).…”

Semi-Remote Gait Assistance Interface: A Joystick with Visual Feedback Capabilities for Therapists

“…Additionally, it should be noted that this type of device is essential in the control of semi-autonomous robots [ 32 , 33 ]. At this point, the implementation of interfaces that involved force or haptic feedback [ 34 ] for obstacle avoidance tasks in dynamic environments and assisted navigation [ 35 , 36 ] should be highlighted. Unfortunately, despite their adequate performance, this kind of application has shown calibration problems due to interface vibration [ 37 ].…”