The population of the United States is greater than it has been. Today, the country’s median age is 38.9, which is almost an older decade than in 1980. And the number of adults over 65 is expected to trigger 58 million to 82 million by 2050. The challenge of caring for the elderly, amid the shortage of care workers, growing health care costs and evolving family structures, is an increasingly urgent social society problem.
To help address the challenge of elderly care, a team of MIT engineers is looking for robotics. They have built and tested the old -age body assistance robot, or electronic bar, a mobile robot designed to physically support the elderly and prevent them from falling as they move through their homes.
E-bar acts as a set of robotic handlebars that follow a person from behind. A user can walk independently or rely on the robot’s arms for support. The robot can support the total weight of the person, raising them to be sitting to stand and vice versa along a natural trajectory. And the robot arms can quickly inflate side airbags if they begin to fall.
With their design, researchers expect to prevent falls, which today are the main cause of injuries in adults over 65 years.
“Many older adults underestimate the risk of falling and refuse to use physical aids, which are cumbersome, while others overestimate the risk and may not exercise, which leads to the decrease in mobility,” says Harry Asada, Ford engineering professor at MIT. “Our design concept is to provide older adults to have a deterioration of balance with robotic handlebars to stabilize their body. The handlebars go anywhere and provide support at any time, when they need it.”
In its current version, the robot is operated by remote control. In future iterations, the team plans to automate much of the functionality of the bot, which allows it to follow autonomously and physically help a user. Researchers are also working to rationalize the device to be thinner and more maneuverable in small spaces.
“I think ElDercare is the next great challenge,” says Electronic Bars Designer Roberto Bolli, a student graduated in the MIT Mechanical Engineering Department. “All demographic trends point to a shortage of caregivers, a surplus of older people and a strong desire that older people getting old. We see it as an unexplored border in the United States, but also as an intrinsically interesting challenge for robotics.”
Bolli and Asada will present an article that details the design of E-Bar at the IEEE conference on robotics and automation (ICRA) at the end of this month.
Home support
The roast group in the MIT develops a variety of technologies and robotic assistants to help the elderly. In recent years, others have developed autumn prediction algorithms, designed robots and automated devices, including robotic walkers, portable airbags, autoinflants and robotic frames that assure a person with a harness and move with them while walking.
In the design of E-Bar, Asada and Bolli pointed to a robot that essentially does three tasks: to provide physical support, prevent falls and move safely and unpleasantly with a person. In addition, they sought to eliminate any harness, to give a user more independence and mobility.
“Older people do not like to use harnesses or assistance devices,” says Bolli. “The idea behind the structure of the electronic bar is that it provides body weight support, active assistance with the march and capture of autumn, while also not hindered in the front. It can leave at any time.”
The team sought to design a robot specifically for aging instead at home or help in care facilities. According to their interviews with older adults and their caregivers, several design requirements occurred to them, including that the robot must fit through the doors of origin, allow the user to take a full step and support their full weight to help with balance, posture and transitions of standing to the position.
The robot consists of a heavy base of 220 pounds whose dimensions and structures were optimized to withstand the weight of an average human without tilting or slipping. Under the base there is a set of omnidirectional wheels that allow the robot to move in any direction without pivoting, if necessary. (Imagine the wheels of a car changing to slide in a space between two other cars, without parallel parking).
It extends from the base of the robot there is an articulated body made of 18 interconnected bars, or links, which can reconfigure as a folding crane to lift a person from a standing position to be standing, and vice versa. Two arms with handlebars extend from the U -shaped robot, that a person can get in and support if he needs additional support. Finally, each robot arm is integrated with air bags made of a soft but admitable material that can instantly inflate to catch a person if it falls, without causing bruise on the impact. Researchers believe E-Bar is the first robot capable of catching a person who falls without portable devices or the use of a harness.
They tested the robot in the laboratory with an older adult who volunteered to use the robot in several household scenarios. The team discovered that E-Bar could actively support the person while they folded to collect something from the ground and stretch to reach an object outside a shelf, tasks that can be difficult to do while maintaining balance. The robot could also lift the person up and on the lip of a bathtub, simulating the task of leaving a bathtub.
Bolli imagines that an e-bar design would be ideal for home use by older people who still have a moderate degree of muscle strength but require assistance devices for daily life activities.
“Seeing the technology used in real -life scenarios is really exciting,” says Bolli.
In their current article, the researchers did not incorporate any prediction of falls in the E-Bar Airbag system. But another project in the roast laboratory, led by the graduated student Emily Kamienski, has focused on developing algorithms with automatic learning to control a new robot in response to the level of risk of falling in real time of the user.
Together with E-Bar, Asada sees different technologies in its laboratory such as providing different levels of assistance for people in certain phases of life or mobility.
“Elderly conditions can change every few weeks or months,” says Asada. “We would like to provide continuous support and without problems such as disabilities or mobility of a person with age.”
This work was supported, in part, by the National Robotics Initiative and the National Science Foundation.