Kansei-Spiritual Therapeutic Robot Interaction Design

摘要

The world is growing older, and the growing concern towards the world's aging population indicates that the aging population is getting bigger and thus causing the growing demand for rehabilitation services and healthcare for the elderly. This has become the main reason for robotics to be one of the most important field in providing assistive care for the elderly. The trend shows that there is already an increasing demand for caregiving, especially for Alzheimer's cases. This study is proposed to formulate a design guide for spiritual practices in Kansei-Spiritual Therapeutic Robot Interaction (KS-TRI) to assist the elderly in terms of performing spiritual practices. The formulated designs for the spiritual therapeutic robot (TRI) were evaluated by using Kansei Engineering methodology. The data was evaluated by using thematic analysis and supported by Principle Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Square (PLS) analysis. The findings revealed that the use of robot interaction with embedded spiritual design elements can become a therapeutic medium and derive positive emotions as it helps improve the elderly's memory and thus helps their spiritual practices, and enable the research to propose a design guide for KS-TRI.