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Designing a new model for the elderly in an assisted living facility : Iterative programming of the NAO robot within a multidisciplinary design environment.

It is estimated that, by 2050, the number of people aged 65 and above will have grown in the European Union by 70%, and people over 80 will have grown by 170%. Therefore, Health Care faces three major challenges: the population of Europe is ageing, Health Care is increasingly effective but also becoming more expensive, and patients, having become true consumers, are also more demanding. The project “PhySeEar” was born with the aim of improving the quality of physiotherapy sessions as well as turning them into a more engaging and lively therapy. This project was performed in the “Nuestra Se˜nora de la Soledad” assisted living facility in Tocina (Sevilla), Spain. During this project, an event happened without being agreed on beforehand: the physiotherapist made the system act as “the bad cop”, while he became closer to the inpatients being himself “the good cop”. Therefore, the system became in chargeof evaluating the inpatients, while the physiotherapist helped them “beat the system”. This finding motivated new research in this field. The purpose in the current project is to design, develop and evaluate a semi autonomous system to assist physiotherapists in training situations. This involves aspects of the “good cop”/ “bad cop” roles, reducing the physiotherapist’s workload through semi-automatic feedback and engaging the inpatients in the therapy. Three systems have been implemented with this intention. The first system uses the NAO robot to model the movements the inpatients have to mimic. The second one uses a virtual version of this robot for the same purpose. The third system uses the NAO robot to model the movements and Kinect to evaluate them. As a conclusion, a guideline based on the knowledge acquired during this thesis has been developed. This guideline consists of recommendations related to the design of a model that will perform certain movements, the use of the Kinect technology in order to track inpatients’ movements and how the system should interact with the physiotherapist during the therapy. This guideline should be considered for future works in this scenario.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kth-170003
Date January 2013
CreatorsLopez Recio, David
PublisherKTH, Skolan för datavetenskap och kommunikation (CSC)
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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