Effectiveness of social behaviors for autonomous wheelchair robot to support elderly people in Japan.

ABSTRACT: We developed a wheelchair robot to support the movement of elderly people and specifically implemented two functions to enhance their intention to use it: speaking behavior to convey place/location related information and speed adjustment based on individual preferences. Our study examines how the evaluations of our wheelchair robot differ when compared with human caregivers and a conventional autonomous wheelchair without the two proposed functions in a moving support context. 28 senior citizens participated in the experiment to evaluate three different conditions. Our measurements consisted of questionnaire items and the coding of free-style interview results. Our experimental results revealed that elderly people evaluated our wheelchair robot higher than the wheelchair without the two f

SUBMITTER: Shiomi M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4439048 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature