Effectiveness of social behaviors for autonomous wheelchair robot to support elderly people in Japan.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 25993038.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0128031 and PMC identifier 4439048.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
We developed a wheelchair robot to support the movement of elderly people and specifically implemented two functions to enhance their intention to use it: speaking behavior to convey place/location related information and speed adjustment based on individual preferences. Our study examines how the evaluations of our wheelchair robot differ when compared with human caregivers and a conventional autonomous wheelchair without the two proposed functions in a moving support context. 28 senior citizens participated in the experiment to evaluate three different conditions. Our measurements consisted of questionnaire items and the coding of free-style interview results. Our experimental results revealed that elderly people evaluated our wheelchair robot higher than the wheelchair without the two functions and the human caregivers for some items.
Medical subject headings
- Robotics
- Social Behavior
- Wheelchairs