Abstract
Good communication between the elderly people and their caregivers, family and friends is essential for quality health care. Many elderly people who live alone are suffering from lack of good communication, which leads to feelings of isolation. Technologies are thus developed to meet the challenges. Although telephones and video conferencing systems have brought the distance barrier down to the lowest, they still cannot provide the sense of being together in the same space. Therefore, TRiCmini, a telepresence robot for interpersonal communication, was developed to provide a higher level of communication to the elderly people by duplicating the three-dimensional face-to-face interaction among humans. TRiCmini consists of the communication module, the movement module, the emotion module, the audio/video module and the power module. Each of the five modules cooperates with one another to provide enhanced interactions between the remote and local users. The remote user relies on the user interface software on a laptop/desktop computer to control TRiCmini to freely move around and communicate with the local user, who are elderly people staying with the robot in the home environment. With the wireless LAN router located in the home environment, TRiCmini is thus connected to the Internet for data transmission. In this way, the face-to-face interaction between the elderly and their family can be rebuilt, even though they are actually not together with each other. Besides, TRiCmini is in a compact size and is easy to operate, just like a home appliance. Moreover, the human-like appearance and emotions make TRiCmini more attractive for everyday use. In summary, TRiCmini demonstrates the extensive ability for multimedia interaction, facial expressions, whole-body emotions, omnidirectional movement, obstacle avoidance and automatic navigation. With these features, the distance barrier can be overcome by means of improved human-robot-human interaction to maintain satisfactory interpersonal communication between the elderly and the beloved family.