Enhancing a Care Partner-Recipient Dyad’s Everyday Home Activities with a Mobile Manipulator Robot

Research Objectives: To investigate how a robot can support independence of the care recipient and their spouse in their everyday living activities.

Design: Participatory design approach.

Setting: Home environment.

Participants: A non-speaking older adult male with quadriplegia caused by a brainstem stroke and his spouse, who is his primary care partner.

Interventions: Participants engaged in research activities between two to six hours a day in their home during the two 14-day cycles with Stretch (an assistive mobile manipulator robot designed to support the participant’s performance and engagement). The care recipient controlled Stretch by using its web-based user interface to do his activities. His spouse used Stretch’s exercise program interface.

Main Outcome Measures: The Canadian Occupational Performance Measure (COPM) was used to identity the participants’ problem areas in self-care, productivity, and leisure. Participants rated their priorities on a 10-point scale along with pre- and post-intervention evaluation of changes in performance and satisfaction. Using the COPM pre-intervention rating, we identified five important tasks each for the care recipient (i.e., self-feeding, maintaining comfort, flipping light switches, meal preparation, and social participation via card games) and their spouse (i.e., exercise, meal preparation and clean-up, household cleaning, laundry, and social participation with the care-recipient).

Results: For the care recipient, their performance on a 10-pt scale was 1.4 before but 8.2 after use of Stretch (a 68% increase). Their satisfaction shifted from 1 to 8.2 (72% increase). For the spouse, similar increases were observed with performance moving from 4.2 to 9 (48% increase) and satisfaction from 4.2 to 10 (58% increase).

Conclusions: Stretch improved the care recipient and spouses’ performance and satisfaction in doing their meaningful activities. Instead of depending on complete assistance from others, Stretch enabled the care-recipient to engage in activities with greater independence while freeing up his spouse’s time to pursue other activities, previously limited by care demands.

Author(s) Disclosures: Dr. Kemp, a Georgia Tech associate professor, is Hello Robot’s CTO with equity and inventor of licensed Georgia Tech IP by Hello Robot. Company sales and value increases grants him royalties.