A Collaborative Elderly Care System using a Companion Robot and a Wearable Device

In this paper, we designed and implemented a collaborative elderly care system (CECAS) using a companion robot and a wearable device. First, we present the overall design of the system. Then, we describe its hardware and software design. Finally, we use three elderly care applications as examples to demonstrate the capability of the proposed system, which include: fall detection and response, conversational assistance, and dietary monitoring. In the fall detection and response application, a two-step method is proposed, which includes a motion data based preliminary detection on the wearable device and a video-based final confirmation on the companion robot. In the conversational assistance application, we implement weather, time, news and jokes skills to test the system. In the dietary monitoring application, in order to reduce the power consumption and improve the accuracy, we develop a wearable- robot-human collaboration mechanism to ensure that the camera captures the best food image at the right time. The results show that the wearable device significantly extended the sensing range of the robot and improved the robot’s capability.