Mental and Physical Training for Elderly Population using Service Robots

In this paper we present the implementation and evaluation of mental and physical exercise applications on a humanoid service robot for use in an elderly care setting. As the mental exercise application a personalized, multi-medial quiz was designed and implemented using information from participants biography. The robot acts as the quiz master, interacting with the participants in a natural and encouraging way. For the physical exercise, a variant of the “charade” game was implemented that uses machine learning from previously collected video samples and computer vision on the robot to identify the activities that participants enact. Both applications were evaluated successfully in a real life setting and highlight the potential of using service robots in elderly care settings.