Towards Robotic Assisted Hygienic Services: Concept for Assisting and Automating Daily Activities in the Bathroom

摘要

Purpose Elderly people use competencies necessary to perform Activities of Daily Living in the following sequence: 1. Bathing, 2. Dressing, 3. Toileting, 4. Transferring, 5. Continence, 6. Feeding. Although bathing is a basic ADL, only a few approaches have tried to establish advanced assistive technology for this field. In the proposed research a basis for introducing automation and robotics for bathing activities was developed. Method Bathing can be divided into a multitude of subactivities which have various relations to each other. In our research we have identified those subactivities as well as usual course of activity (activity chains). In order to identify sub-activities which can or should be automated the bathing activity was analyzed (course of activity, time needed to perform sub-activities, problems etc.) of several persons of different ages. Based on this research concepts for partially and fully automated bath environments were explored. This exploration design was performed systemically as follows: i) research and identification of needs, ii) definition of requirements, iii) identification of technologies and processes, iv) initial concept, v) experiment in real environment, vi) final concept and further development roadmap. Results & Discussion: The concepts developed for configuring a robotic bath show that, it is basically possible to automate a sequence of subactivities in the bathroom. However, there remain many open questions: What degree of automation is suitable for which kind of person? Can safety issues, especially in the bathroom, be met by an automated bath? Can the system be modularized in order to meet the requirements of different room layouts?