Robotics for Health and Well-Being [Women in Engineering]

Have you ever seen a person with dementia? My first contact with a dementia patient was in the 1990s when I was a student. My grandmother got dementia. This personal experience combined with the strong social need led me in the direction of robotics: robotics for health and well-being and, above all, robotics for the prevention of dementia. There are 44 million people suffering with dementia worldwide. With this number increasing every year, it is expected to be 135 million by 2050, which is three times the current rate. There is a serious need to develop technologies to prevent cognitive decline and dementia since the current pharmacological therapies do not suppress the disease process. It looks as if a medical solution, nonpharmacological intervention to cognitive systems based on its embedded algorithm, should be possible since humans can be viewed as intelligent machines and dementia is a breakdown of the machine. This article describes the holistic and exploratory efforts to develop effective treatments for the prevention of dementia, starting from and partially coming back to the robotics and automation discipline. This proposal was originally presented at an invited talk during the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Women in Engineering (WIE) Luncheon at the 2013 IEEE/Robotics Society of Japan International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Tokyo, Japan (Figure 1). Xiaorui Zhu, the WIE liaison coordinator of RAS gave me the opportunity to present the information. I formerly