SoCS Research Seminar

Caregiver 4.0 – Experiences from Introducing a Robot into a Geriatric Long Term Care Environment

 

Time: Monday, 11/7/16, 2pm

Place: MC0020

Abstract

In my talk, I would like to give an overview of our scientific work that we conduct within the STRANDS-project, where the School of Computer Science of the University of Lincoln is also part of.

Due to demographic changes that lead to an ageing society, a shortage of care provision is anticipated. As a probable solution technical aids for enhancing independent living of older adults and for supporting staff in the elder care sector are proposed. But technical aids often lack required autonomy and were so far primarily tested in lab situations. Thus, the STRANDS –project came to live with the aim to develop a long-term autonomous learning robotic system that can be actually deployed in elder care and in other work environments under “real-world conditions” over longer periods of time.

Besides the technical challenges associated with such an endeavour, different questions were raised:  What does staff in the elder care sector require from a robotic aid? In what areas could we deploy our STRANDS-robot in real world conditions? How would older adults and care staff experience interacting or working with the robot? What ethical guidelines have to be met when introducing a robotic aid in such an environment? And what could the future with such robotic aids look like in elder care? Questions that will be addressed in this presentation.

 

Biography

Denise Hebesberger studied Biology (grad. 2013) and Educational Science (grad. 2012) at the University of Vienna. After graduation and working in different fields of science, she joined the Academy for Research on Ageing as a project manager in 2014. The Academy is social science partner within different EU-wide research consortia that develop technical aids and assistive systems for older adults or for the care sector and study their impact in terms of social acceptance and human-robot interaction on end users. She is responsible for establishing theoretical frameworks, evaluation designs and data analysis (mixed methods designs & structural equation modelling), as well as dissemination of research results and scientific publications.