On-Body Robots Could Help Older Folks Live Richer Lives
Would you wear a robot on your body? A team of researchers conducted a design probe to determine if people are receptive to the idea.
We tend to think of robots as distinct, self-contained entities. The android-style robots of science fiction seem almost like synthetic animals. In real life, industrial robots work in factories away from human personnel, like antisocial misfits, while the vacuum robots in our homes go about their business while doing their best to evade our notice — though they usually fail at that. But what if a robot were more like a benevolent symbiotic parasite? That might sound scary at first, but this paper presents a scenario in which on-body robots could help older folks live richer lives.
“On-body robots” are unique robots designed to be worn by the user. Instead of existing separately from the humans they serve, like those industrial robots and Roomba vacuums, they live on humans. From an engineering standpoint, this concept has some big advantages. Why give a humanoid robot an expensive and power-hungry set of legs when you could just have the human user carry the robot around? In the right situations, that could be very practical.
Those situations, as this team envisions, are quite varied and they developed ideas through a design probe conducted with the assistance of older adults, ages 66 to 84. In that probe, they used Calico as a demonstration. Calico is a on-body robot, developed previously by some of the authors of this paper, that travels around the body on flexible tracks.
One scenario they came up with involves a person who needs to perform physical therapy, but is reluctant — we all struggle to build up the motivation to exercise, after all. In that scenario, the user taps their wearable robot to start a session and the robot detects their reluctance. To provide encouragement, the robot then shows excitement through lighting effects and physical movement. Thanks to that moral support, the user begins their exercise and the on-body robot gives guidance through haptic feedback and visual cues. At the same time, it monitors the user’s performance, detecting fatigue and suggesting rest when necessary.
To be clear, the robot imagined in that scenario doesn’t exist. But it could. This research is simply one of the first steps in determining if anyone actually wants an on-body robot and what tasks such robots might be suited to.
If nothing else, this paper shows that the 13 participants in the design probe were at least somewhat open to the idea of an on-body robot.
