Hobbit, a care robot supporting independent living at home: First prototype and lessons learned

One option to address the challenge of demographic transition is to build robots that enable aging in place. Falling has been identified as the most relevant factor to cause a move to a care facility. The Hobbit project combines research from robotics, gerontology, and human-robot interaction to develop a care robot which is capable of fall prevention and detection as well as emergency detection and handling. Moreover, to enable daily interaction with the robot, other functions are added, such as bringing objects, offering reminders, and entertainment. The interaction with the user is based on a multimodal user interface including automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, gesture recognition, and a graphical touch-based user interface. We performed controlled laboratory user studies with a total of 49 participants (aged 70 plus) in three EU countries (Austria, Greece, and Sweden). The collected user responses on perceived usability, acceptance, and affordability of the robot demonstrate a positive reception of the robot from its target user group. This article describes the principles and system components for navigation and manipulation in domestic environments, the interaction paradigm and its implementation in a multimodal user interface, the core robot tasks, as well as the results from the user studies, which are also reflected in terms of lessons we learned and we believe are useful to fellow researchers. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.