A robot motion design scheme for watching the elderly based on human gesture sensing

Abstract Watching the elderly is one of promising IoT applications in the field of nursing care. Humanoid robots are considered to be useful agents for not only relaxing the elderly but also watching and alerting them in a daily life. Detecting and preventing the risk of indoor heat stroke is an important issue especially for the elderly who live alone. A method for reliably conveying the possible danger of the indoor heat stroke to the elderly is a crucial factor to implement a practical system. In this paper, we describe the system for detecting possible risk of suffering from the indoor heat stroke and informing the detected state to the elderly by using a communication robot. While the robot normally gives users healing, the proposed system implements a method for certainly notifying the abnormal conditions to the elderly by using robot motions. Because designing natural robot motions is a difficult task even for skilled engineers, we also devise a method to easily creating new robot motions by imitating human body gestures. We design a set of normal and special motions for a desktop humanoid robot and evaluated whether the robot motions can effectively make users aware of abnormal situations.