The MORPHIA Project: First Results of a Long-Term User Study in an Elderly Care Scenario from Robotic Point of View

Abstract:
In an aging society, efficiently organizing care taking tasks is of great importance including several players (here referred to as caregivers) like relatives, friends, professional caretakers, employees of retirement homes, clubs and so on. Especially for long-distance relationships, this can be burdensome and time-consuming. While supporting devices, like mobile phones or tablets, are slowly reaching the elder community, the drawbacks are obvious. These passive devices need to be handled by the elderly themselves, this includes an proper understanding of the operation, remembering to charge the devices, or even to hear incoming calls or messages. In the project MORPHIA, we target these drawbacks by combining a social communication platform on a tablet with a mobile robotic platform that can be remote-controlled by all mentioned actors of the supporting network or actively deliver messages emitted from the network. In this paper, we present the first stage of our demonstrator in terms of implemented hard- and software components. Since the price is a key factor for acceptance of such a system in the care community, we performed a technical assessment of these components based on our findings during the development process. In addition, we present the results of the first user tests with 5 participants over two weeks each between August and November 2021 (two further test iterations are planned for 2022 and 2023). This includes general usage of specific robotic services as well as technical benchmarks to assess the robustness of the developed system in domestic environments.