An Ecosystem for Heterogeneous Robotic Assistants in Caregiving

Kurzfassung

Demographic change and its various implications will offer some of the biggest challenges faced by society and our health-care systems in the coming decades. While the number of people in need of caregiving is steadily growing in most industrial nations, the number of caregivers is not keeping up with this increasing demand. Robotic assistance systems have the potential to mitigate this problem and support caregivers, people in need, and, thus, the health-care systems in numerous ways. We present the concept and demonstrate the first application scenarios of a holistic ecosystem for robotic assistants in caregiving. This ecosystem involves various robots covering individual demands and combines several robotic technologies, ranging from autonomous operation over shared control to telepresence modes, for dealing with the wide variety of situations in everyday caregiving. Working toward this ecosystem, we have already implemented its core functionalities on the basis of our robotic prototypes and demonstrate exemplary scenarios to showcase the feasibility of the approach.