Enhancing a beam+ telepresence robot for remote home care applications

The aging population is putting increasing pressure on health care systems in many developed countries, and maintaining quality of care while controlling costs becomes a major issue that needs to be addressed. With platforms now available at 2,000 $US, telepresence robots are one potential solution to provide remote care services to elders living in their homes. However, they need improved capabilities to make them more than simple “Skype on wheels” devices. To make telepresence robots suitable for remote home care applications, they must offer enhanced and robust functionalities such as autonomous navigation, artificial audition and vital sign monitoring. Therefore, we integrated such capabilities on a beam+ platform using a robot control architecture, demonstrating the feasibility of adding these capabilities on a commercial robot.