Background
The background for the development of the Florence system is the slow but constant demographic change. There is an increasing number of elderly people, while the number of younger people remains constant or even declines. Due to the advances in health treatment, a lot of previously fatal diseases have been turned into chronic diseases. This leads to an increasing demand for care, especially for elderly. In addition to that, new family structures and more job-mobility make it more and more difficult to rely on volunteer care for elderly at home by family members. Hence, costs for both the society and the care provider are growing, which, at the end, may lead to potential undersupply of health care. Beyond the financial aspect, another problem is the increasing lack of social inclusion due to less stable social networks, which leads into increasing loneliness of the elderly with negative impact on their health and safety
Vision
The aim of the Florence project is to improve the well-being of elderly (and that of their beloved ones) as well as improve the efficiency in care through Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) services, supported by a general-purpose mobile robot platform. The Florence project will investigate the use of such robots in delivering new kinds of AAL services to elderly persons and their care providers. Florence will put the robot as the connecting element between several stand alone AAL services in a living environment as well as between the AAL services and the elderly person. Through these care, coaching and connectedness services, supported by Florence, the elderly will remain much longer independent.
A key aspect for Florence is user acceptance. Florence aims to improve the acceptance of AAL (robotic) services by providing both assistance and fun oriented lifestyle services via the same means. The ambition of Florence is that the elderly should be proud of having a Florence robot. Florence positions robots as autonomous lifestyle devices. By re-using the same interaction mechanisms of lifestyle services, Florence will make the adoption of AAL services by elderly easier. In addition, by positioning robots as a new kind of consumer products, i.e. as a new lifestyle product, Florence will attract the attention of services providers and consumer electronic vendors to the senior market. This is illustrated below. This increase of user-acceptance will greatly alleviate the need for personal care for elderly, and therefore provide for significant cost-savings.
Expected Results
The Florence system will support lifestyle and AAL services in the following categories:
- Family involvement: Florence will provide a non–obstructive, intuitive way of asynchronous communication with family members by sending pictures to the family members′ mobile phones or emails or getting pictures from the family members to Florence robot′s screen. This example application enables both sides to say “I am thinking of you” without forcing a direct answer.
- Video telephone: Implementing a video communication possibility enables the elderly person to participate in the family life e.g. by seeing the grandchild or daughter.
- Home observation: The Florence robot can be sent to other rooms to take a picture to see what is going on. Open windows and cupboards could be detected and lost objects can be found.
- Emergency Intervention: In case of an emergency situation, e.g. a detected fall, a mobile robot has the advantage that it is able to move towards the person. The robot can talk to the person first, and than take a picture, send it to caregivers and initiate an alarm. Furthermore, the fallen person could call the robot for help. The robot is able to bring communication means directly to the user and initiate a call to family members or caregivers.
- Direct coaching: Florence will be able to monitor several sensory data items. One possible application for coaching is to give advices for wellness or activities.
- Remote coaching: Remote diagnosis is an example application of remote coaching. The collected data from the monitoring, together with answered questions on the phone and symptoms shown via a video conference system, will lead to a clearer diagnosis of a remote caregiver or doctor.
- Communication among caregivers: Florence will support a blog-like system that enables caregivers to maintain a diary about their activities. This is especially useful in cases of mild dementia, where communication with the elderly themselves is not always reliable.
Approach
The Florence project will adopt a highly user centric approach by executing rapid design cycles that start with focus group sessions, interviews and Wizard-of-Oz experiments, and continues with cycles of developments and evaluations at the partners' sites and living labs.
Florence will use an off-the-shelf robotic platform based on the PEKEEII of Wany Robotics . The Florence robot consists of a mobile platform on top of which a touch screen is mounted. The project adopts a service-oriented approach in order to support the seamless integration of capabilities provided by the robot, the home, and any required remote service providers. The OSGi services platform technology is used for the interoperability and interaction of the different services not inside the robot platform, and on the residential gateway that connects both to the robot platform and the outside world.