Robots have begun to assist elders and, in particular, patients suffering dementia. Many works have shown how robots can improve patients’ daily life. But non of these works aims to improve also the caregivers’ quality of life.
The RobAlz project focuses on how social robots can assist Alzheimer’s Desease patients and their caregivers at home. This project is divided in three phases: the definition of the requirements and scenarios, the development of a new robotic platform, and the evaluation. This work presents a resume of the results obtained in the first phase.
In the first phase, several meetings were conducted with a set of multidisciplinary experts in the areas of Alzheimer’s Disease and social robots: members of the Spanish Alzheimer Foundation, psychologists, therapists, professional caregivers, family caregivers, and robotic experts. The meetings were classified according to the application areas they covered: general aspects, safety, entertainment, personal assistance, and stimulation. The meetings ended up with a repertory of scenarios approved by all the experts where robots can be successfully applied to Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers at their home.