ABSTRACT
Nowadays, service robots are highly anticipated in an aging society with low birthrates due to a shortage of human workers. Furthermore, COVID-19 avoids daily human communication in person. To utilize service robots in such a society, several types of robots are necessary to cope with the aforementioned society's various problems. Through collaboration with various types of robots, we have proposed and demonstrated an architecture for providing a broader range of services through this study. This architecture eliminates robot interface differences and allows the connection of various robots with a common communication protocol. In the teleoperation experiment, we could connect various types of robots manufactured by different companies using a general-purpose interface unit and we could teleoperate them via the Internet. We also confirmed in the collaboration experiment that the robots can be connected regardless of their functions by managing them according to their functions. Our architecture has verified the function to make collaboration of different types of robots both in teleoperation and collaborative tasks by different robots. In the future, we will conduct experiments to evaluate the practical services that service robots can provide in actual facilities such as shopping malls. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The increasingly severe situation of ageing population has caused great pressure on the global wealth reserve, population security, economic construction, and social stability. Under this background, it is of great importance to realize the ideological, institutional, and economic changes from raising & nursing the elderly to actively ageing as soon as possible. The concept of active ageing was written in the Political Declaration and Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing of the UN at the beginning of this century, which is a global policy framework to deal with the problem of population ageing in the 21st century. Active ageing believes that the elderly have great potential and energy and are valuable social resources. By stimulating their potential, the elderly could not only realize their self-worth but also contribute to society, instead of blindly needing social care. Digital technology is an important technology to support active ageing. However, the digital divide in front of the elderly has greatly affected the role and effect of digital technology in an ageing society. The sudden COVID-19 also highlights the seriousness of the digital divide among the elderly and the importance of building an ageing-inclusive digital economy. Under this background, it is of great significance to carry out the related research and other actives of the ageing-inclusive digital economy, which will provide solutions for actively responding to the global challenge of ageing and help all parts of the world to effectively turn the ageing pressure into driving force of the economy. This paper introduces the global survey on ageing-inclusive digital economy and related standards conducted in early 2021, which aimed to clarify the influence and challenges of the digital economy on the elderly, and the expectations and demands of building an ageing-inclusive digital economy. The results from this survey show that the digital economy has a high impact on the elderly, but on the contrary, the participation of the elderly is low although there are strong will. © 2022 ACM.
ABSTRACT
Staying mobile is the key to ensuring high quality of life for older adults. With the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ability to live and move around independently becomes more critical for the most aging society. While several efforts have been made to invest in mobility solutions to help improve older adults’ mobility, there is still a lack of good practice and guidelines for developing such a niche Information Technology (IT) solution. In this paper, we report our experience of using Living Lab, a design science approach, to assess and capture the needs of mobility solutions for older adults. A semi-structured interview involving 25 older adults was conducted. We identified interesting and practical requirements/functionalities from the participants that might be otherwise overlooked if we followed the traditional software development process. The participants provided valuable feedback to help improve our mobility solution in two main areas, mainly the design and functionality of the application. The findings from this case study can potentially be applied for future work that attempts to address similar problems in the same domain. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
As the percentage of the older adults population increases worldwide, both the risk of social isolation of the older adults and the shortage of nursing care personnel have become major issues. To address these issues, we have developed a recreational program, the scenario-type robot-assisted recreation, to promote communication among the older adults in aged care facilities. While the burden of the facility staff increases due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we improved the robot operation interface, developed a system to support the operation of this activity by the facility staff from a remote location, and developed a system to realize communication with remote family members, in order to smoothly operate this recreational activity by the facility staff by themselves. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The arrival of a super-aging society due to demographic changes is a growing concern in many parts of Japan. Ohnishi et al. (2015), through their approach to the problem of shopping refugees using large-scale telephone directory data, selected Maebashi City in Gunma Prefecture (2017-) as the subject of this study and actually conducted a field survey. The city has been selected from the perspective of conducting an actual field survey and conducting an analysis linked to movement trends. In this analysis, an overview of the movement patterns of this data both domestically and internationally was conducted in consideration of anonymity, as well as trends around stations, universities, and other institutions, and a discussion of movement patterns in relation to the effects of weather which is expected to show the trend of human flow in normal period because it is the data before the COVID-19 disaster after 2020. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
With the growth of aging societies, the health of the elderly is considered one of the critical issues. Regular physical activity is linked to improving physical and mental functions. Therefore, there is an urgent need to motivate the elderly to be physically active. The self-monitoring of physical activity may positively impact the awareness of exercise and health and increase activity levels. In this study, we conducted a 12-week trial with thirty Japanese elderly to investigate the effects of self-monitoring on their attitudes, awareness, and activity levels. During the trial, the participants wore activity trackers daily and responded to repeated questionnaires weekly. The Covid-19 pandemic has begun to appear a few weeks after starting this trial. Therefore, we explored the impact of this pandemic on the participants' activity and psychological status. Overall, the participants increased their perception of the benefits of self-monitoring and willingness to check the activity tracker's feedback. Despite there was a significant decrease (p < 0.05) in the participant number of steps due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the percentage of reduction was small (11%). The self-monitoring of activity may help the elderly maintain activity level during the pandemic. Furthermore, the participants agreed with the importance of monitoring physical activity and the necessity to maintain activity level during the Covid-19 pandemic. © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery. All rights reserved.