Co-adaptation of Robot Systems, Processes and In-house Environments for Professional Care Assistance in an Ageing Society

The recruitment of new workforce for the field of care taking is difficult in highly industrialized countries and the gap between demand and availability of care takers will further increase with the expected increase in aged populations in the future. In particular, service robot systems are able to enhance the capabilities of assisted environments significantly as they add critical capabilities and thus allow environments to actively support care givers and care takers with the full bandwidth of necessary processes, tasks and services. Service robot systems add to assisted environments besides the aspect of hard physical assistance capabilities with flexibility, increased intelligence and situational awareness and provide new ways of intuitive man-machine-interaction. However, the integration of service robot systems into real world assisted environments has been difficult due to the usually separate development of environment and stand-alone robot systems. In this paper, the authors present a conceptual approach for a robotic care environment in which care environment (including room layouts, furniture and distributed sensors), service robot systems and care processes are fully synchronized and co-adapted.