Conversation-Based Medication Management System for Older Adults Using a Companion Robot and Cloud

Memory loss is a part of normative aging. Many older adults commonly forget to take prescribed medication, which can have an adverse effect on health. Therefore, it is important to provide older adults with a medication reminder service. There are several mobile apps and devices capable of reminding medication, but their user interfaces and operations are usually unfriendly to seniors. Considering the above demands and shortcomings, we proposed a conversation-based medication management system (CMMS). The CMMS uses a companion robot and the cloud to create medication reminders and check medication adherence. We implemented the CMMS in our ASCC (Advanced Sensing, Computation and Control) companion robot. To evaluate the CMMS, we tested our system through the mobile app end with 23 human subjects and the robot end with 15 human subjects. The feedback from the post-test survey shows that the convenience, usefulness and total rating of our system is 8.217, 8.696 and 8.478 out of 10 from the mobile app end and 9.000, 8.933 and 8.533 out of 10 from the robot end, respectively. The System Usability Scale (SUS) score of our system is 81.333 from the robot end users, which means the participants had a high satisfaction level when using the system.