Abstract
Background
The worldwide population of older adults will soon exceed the capacity of assisted living facilities. Accordingly, we aim to understand whether appropriately designed robots could help older adults stay active at home.
Methods
Building on related literature as well as guidance from experts in game design, rehabilitation, and physical and occupational therapy, we developed eight human-robot exercise games for the Baxter Research Robot, six of which involve physical human-robot contact. After extensive iteration, these games were tested in an exploratory user study including 20 younger adult and 20 older adult users.
Results
Only socially and physically interactive games fell in the highest ranges for pleasantness, enjoyment, engagement, cognitive challenge, and energy level. Our games successfully spanned three different physical, cognitive, and temporal challenge levels. User trust and confidence in Baxter increased significantly between pre- and post-study assessments. Older adults experienced higher exercise, energy, and engagement levels than younger adults, and women rated the robot more highly than men on several survey questions.
Conclusions
The results indicate that social-physical exercise with a robot is more pleasant, enjoyable, engaging, cognitively challenging, and energetic than similar interactions that lack physical touch. In addition to this main finding, researchers working in similar areas can build on our design practices, our open-source resources, and the age-group and gender differences that we found.
Background
Increases in life expectancy foreshadow the need for more accessible healthcare solutions in the United States and beyond [1, 2]. Society will soon encounter limits not only on the capacity of assisted living facilities, but also on medical services at large. Thus, solutions that bolster the health of older adults while allowing them to live independently will become more important. One strategy to enhance our society’s ability to keep older adults healthy and active in their homes is the introduction of assistive robots in everyday environments.
A key contribution of this work is understanding how robots with social interaction skillsanddynamic physical interaction skills can encourage exercise. Generally, low-impact exercises are recommended to keep older individuals cognitively and physically well [3–5]. Researchers have already found that robotic exoskeletons can promote upper-limb exercise by physically interacting with human users [6]. Other investigations have indicated that robots can motivate older adults to stay active via social exercise encouragement [7, 8]. As pictured in Fig. 1, the exercise games we designed fit at the new intersection of physical human-robot interaction and socially assistive robotics. Our central goal is to determine whether and how a robot can encourage enjoyable light exercise via social-physical exercise games.
This research builds on our previous investigations of playful hand-clapping robots [9, 10] by applying similar hardware, robot motion, and hand-contact detection strategies to accomplish a wider variety of physical human-robot interactions. Our work explores the use of the Rethink Robotics Baxter Research Robot to promote exercise via eight games, six of which involve dynamic physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). These activities were further designed for personalization to the physical and cognitive abilities of the user. Initial prototypes of these six pHRI games were described in [11] and demonstrated at the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction [12].
After we review the related work in the next subsection, the Human-Robot Exercise Game Design Section of this paper outlines our game design iteration steps. The Exploratory User Study Methods Section describes the proof-of-concept study that helped us judge the viability of using these games to engage older adults and promote exercise. The Results Section demonstrates that both younger and older people are willing to interact with the robot in playful exercise games and that only physically interactive games fell in the highest ranges for pleasantness, enjoyment, engagement, cognitive challenge, and energy level. The Discussion Section reviews the key points and future directions related to this work.[…]
TBI Rehabilitation 