ICF: Socially Assistive Walker To Promote The Health And Well-being In Older Adults

This proposal is based on robust evidence around the need for physical and social care during ageing. Assistance and monitoring are required to secure better health and wellbeing for individuals as they age. As isolation and reduced access to health services are critical issues for older adults, we need to develop a robotic assistive tool that will push the boundaries of existing physical assistive devices by integrating the functionalities of a social agent to address isolation, loneliness, and diminished independence. This project will develop a multimodal robotic platform to assist and monitor people with neurodegenerative conditions associated with typical and atypical ageing and the potential development of mental health conditions.
Mobility and balance are commonly compromised in older adults, with the costs associated with falls estimated at £2.3 billion/year. Despite efforts to develop assistive robots to support older adults during the last 20 years, such as exoskeletons, smart walkers, and social robots, they are far from actual user adoption due to lack of wearability, robustness, and cost issues. This project will embed affordable and tangible robotic technology on the walker frames already adopted by mid-fragile older adults to generate a novel co-designed robot with physical and social interaction capabilities interconnected with carers and families to present a promising solution to empower our healthcare system.
With ten years of research in gait assistance and rehabilitation and human-robot interaction, the PI and his multidisciplinary team are ideally placed to explore this research opportunity. The group, composed of biorobotics and healthcare experts along with the NHS and ageing private organisations, will work for 24 months to address the needs of older adults with the help of healthcare technology.
SAW-Health includes (1) Activities of Daily Living (ADL) assistance and autonomy: The robot provides path planning, navigation, localisation, and guidance in multiple scenarios to enable autonomy and independence. (2) Gait assistance and physical activity monitoring: To assist patients with motor disabilities and induce physical activity. A wearable sensor architecture will gather biomechanical and physiological information from the user to estimate gait quality and the overall user's health state. (3) Social interaction: The robot will integrate the functionalities of a social agent to provide companionship to the users with cutting-edge technology. The final goal is to compare the usability of the implemented robotic system with a traditional walker in healthy older adults in care homes and independent houses.

This proposal is grounded in compelling evidence of ageing individuals' physical and social care needs. As neurodegenerative conditions associated with typical and atypical ageing pose significant challenges, assistance and monitoring are critical to promoting health and wellbeing in older people. With isolation and limited access to healthcare services being prevalent issues among older adults, this project aims to develop a multimodal robotic platform that embeds affordable technology onto the frames of walkers that mid-fragile older adults commonly use.
The novel co-designed robot will be interconnected with carers and families, promising to empower healthcare systems. The team, comprising bio-robotics and healthcare experts, as well as the NHS and ageing private organisations, will work to address the needs of older people by applying cutting-edge technologies. A multisource semantic processing pipeline will gather data from the user and the environment to apply techniques involving machine learning, natural language processing, kinematic control loops, a navigation stack, and a computer vision engine. This will be deployed in a central server workstation that handles rapid and safe communication protocols.
SAW-Health includes several core components to meet the specific needs of ageing individuals. Firstly, Activities of Daily Living (ADL) assistance and autonomy, enabled by human-robot-environment interaction strategies in multiple scenarios, will promote independence and autonomy. Secondly, gait assistance and physical activity monitoring will assist patients with motor disabilities and encourage physical activity through a wearable sensor architecture that gathers biomechanical and physiological information to estimate gait quality and overall user health. Finally, social interaction will be integrated into the robot's functionalities to provide companionship to users, using cutting-edge social interaction theories.