Robot-assisted healthcare support for an aging society

Abstract

Eldercare is one of the most important healthcare concerns, particularly in countries whose populations are rapidly aging. This paper proposes the use of a robot system to improve the quality of life of elderly people in two ways, first by monitoring their home care services using image and sound sensors in the robots, and the second by assisting elders by understanding social situations using face authentication technology. This paper presents a concrete set of security policies to protect the privacy of the care-receiver of such home care services. An IT system architecture is also presented to monitor the data in a secure manner. Experimental results show the effectiveness and the practicality of the proposed robot system for typical home care services. © 2012 IEEE.