Effectiveness of social behaviors for autonomous wheelchair robot to support elderly people in Japan

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 e...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2015-05, Vol.10 (5), p.e0128031-e0128031
Main Authors: Shiomi, Masahiro, Iio, Takamasa, Kamei, Koji, Sharma, Chandraprakash, Hagita, Norihiro
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aged
Aging
Attitude surveys
Behavior
Caregivers
Communication
Disability
Elderly
Female
Geriatrics
Humans
International conferences
Interpersonal relations
Japan
Laboratories
Male
Motivation
Older people
People with disabilities
Place preferences
Psychological aspects
R&D
Reproducibility of Results
Research & development
Researchers
Robotics
Robots
Shopping
Social aspects
Social Behavior
Surveys and Questionnaires
Technology application
Wheelchairs
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0128031