A social robot to support integrated person centered care.

Caring for a person with dementia PwD can be a significant personal and emotional challenge for informal carers. Informal caregivers frequently report experiencing high levels of stress, mental and physical fatigue, social withdrawal and sleeplessness 1,2. Several technologies and services have been developed to support the care for people with dementia 3. Lifestyle monitoring 4 can reduce caregiver's distress and thereby extend the period that the informal caregiver can sustain the care and support needs for the PwD 5. With lifestyle monitoring, carers have insight in the daily pattern of a person with dementia and thereby communication between both can be enhanced 6. Nevertheless, lifestyle monitoring is unidirectional without the PwD in the communication loop. To support integrated person centered care, we added social robotics to lifestyle monitoring in the European eWare project 7 to support bidirectional communication. Furthermore, the lifestyle monitoring sensors add context awareness to the social robot and the social robot provides an interface between the PwD and the informal carer. With increasing context awareness, the social robot can provide context relevant suggestions to the PwD, yet, it is unknown which suggestions are most appropriate and effective. To gain an insight in these context relevant suggestions, six focus groups 3 with formal carers and 3 with informal carers were performed in three countries The Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy. From the results, 11 functionalities were extracted, rated and ranked with - among others - activity guidance and inactivity monitoring as relevant functionalities to include. The integration of lifestyle monitoring and social robotics is promising and of value to support integrated person centered care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]