Robot-assisted Intelligent Emergency System for Individual Elderly Independent Living

With the ever-increasing aging population and others in need of close monitoring, there is a profound demand for an efficient and economical counter-emergency system. This paper proposes a smart connected real-time voice and video communication and tele-controlled co-robot system to provide a highly secured counter-emergency solution for people living alone, especially for elder adults. A comprehensive personal emergency assistant tele-robotics guard system is provided pervasive emergency intelligence for independent living. It contains three modules: robot awareness module, wearable emergency analysis module, and remote-control module. The robot in the robot awareness module is able to find out the yell of "help". The wearable emergency analysis module can recognize a person's activity and predict health condition. The remote-control module can control the robot remotely by using mobile devices. This smart connected tele-robotics guard system will dynamically detect, alarm, tele-operate for emergency situations. The prototypes have designed and developed with vocal help requests and wearable sensors to actively protect a person in emergency situations even when he/she loses consciousness, mobility, or clear conversation capability. The latest prototype was deployed in a senior home facility for extensive testing, eliciting real-life data to conduct further improvements.