Research status of elderly-care robots and safe human-robot interaction methods

Donghui Zhao; Xingwang Sun; Bo Shan; Zihao Yang; Junyou Yang; Houde Liu; Yinlai Jiang; Yokoi Hiroshi

doi:10.3389/fnins.2023.1291682

Research status of elderly-care robots and safe human-robot interaction methods

Front Neurosci. 2023 Nov 30:17:1291682. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2023.1291682. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Donghui Zhao^{1

2}, Xingwang Sun¹, Bo Shan¹, Zihao Yang¹, Junyou Yang¹, Houde Liu², Yinlai Jiang³, Yokoi Hiroshi³

Affiliations

¹ School of Electrical Engineering, Shenyang University of Technology, Shenyang, China.
² Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, China.
³ Department of Mechanical Engineering and Intelligent Systems, University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan.

Abstract

Faced with the increasingly severe global aging population with fewer children, the research, development, and application of elderly-care robots are expected to provide some technical means to solve the problems of elderly care, disability and semi-disability nursing, and rehabilitation. Elderly-care robots involve biomechanics, computer science, automatic control, ethics, and other fields of knowledge, which is one of the most challenging and most concerned research fields of robotics. Unlike other robots, elderly-care robots work for the frail elderly. There is information exchange and energy exchange between people and robots, and the safe human-robot interaction methods are the research core and key technology. The states of the art of elderly-care robots and their various nursing modes and safe interaction methods are introduced and discussed in this paper. To conclude, considering the disparity between current elderly care robots and their anticipated objectives, we offer a comprehensive overview of the critical technologies and research trends that impact and enhance the feasibility and acceptance of elderly care robots. These areas encompass the collaborative assistance of diverse assistive robots, the establishment of a novel smart home care model for elderly individuals using sensor networks, the optimization of robot design for improved flexibility, and the enhancement of robot acceptability.

Keywords: acceptability; elderly-care robots; nursing mode; practicality; safe interaction methods.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by Shenzhen Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars: RCJC20210706091946001, National Key Research and Development Program of China: 2022YFB4701400/4701402, the General Project of Liaoning Provincial Department of Education: LJKZ0124 and the Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province: 2021-BS-152.