Robot Partner Technology Based on Information Support System for Elderly People and Their Family

Abstract

The development of robot partners for supporting daily life of human has been increasing recently. One main feature in developing such robot is the communication system. The main issues to be solved are, what kind of information can be provided, when the information is provided, how to convey the information and so on. In this paper, we try to solve these problems by proposing a communication system for the robot partner. We focus on information support system for elderly people and their family. We use a smartphone based robot partner to directly interact with elderly person, while using web based avatar to communicate with the elderly person's family. The web based avatar acquires data from the robot partner everyday. Thus, the elderly person's family can check the elderly person's activity. In order to provide elderly people with suitable information, we also use the proposed system for extracting their preferences.