We are passionate about Assistive and Social Care Robotics and I am currently developing ACR (Assistive Care Robotics) and have a working ACR prototype ALTAIR. Our ALTAIR robot is sensor rich and can help users with their daily health routines, automatically monitoring aspects of their current health condition. ALTAIRS’s thermal imager with body/face (non-contact) thermal scan (multi-pixel thermal imager) can accurately read a users body temperature up to 2 meters away. It can also measure heart rate (BPM) and SpO2 level (High-Sensitivity Pulse Oximeter) and breathing. A special external interface allows the robot to measure the users blood pressure. With this data ALTAIR can notify family members, carers or emergency services if an emergency situation is detected.
Demographic reports indicate that the population of older adults is growing significantly over the world and in particular in developed nations. As we all know, there is a huge gap in health care in this Country and around the World - we currently do not have the money/resources to supply adequately humane care for many of our disabled/elderly citizens. With the Global Robotics Sector set to be worth $150Billion by 2025 investments in robotics will mean ever faster developments of advanced robotics and Ai (Source Tech Republic).
Over the last decade, we have seen great developments in advanced robotics (and Ai) that continues to improve year after year. We are fast approaching a time where robotic social carers will be common place.
Social care sector local authorities fund 87% of care and local authorities budgets are being cut year after year, the system is at breaking point! Government policy is to keep people at home as much as possible and Assistive Robotics can help make this possible.This article addresses what is possible now and in the near future with ACR (Assistive Care Robotics).
Our ALTAIR Robot is expected to retail under £10,000, so this is the starting point for this evaluation.
For younger users
Socially Assistive Robotics aims to endow robots with the ability to help people through individual non-contact assistance (with the exception of feeding) in convalescence, rehabilitation, training, and education. ACR would help the following people:
Disabled
Assistive Robotics (also known as Disability Robotics) can in many cases greatly add to the users quality of life. When caregivers aren’t available to help someone with limited mobility 24 hours a day, technology can step in. Our work on Assistive Robotics is to enable people with disabilities maintain a sense of independence while accomplishing everyday tasks they no longer can do on their own.
Elderly
Assistive Robots will be a great complement to Elderly care even with today's level of robotics. Robots must be acceptable to older people, we need to design and develop robot hardware/software that can be easily deployed and used in practice, and how to place robots in a care system that really helps and empowers older people and also care staff. Robots offer basic care, companionship, entertainment and Technology Enabled Care Services (TECS).
Autism
Personalised robots could one day act as a “social bridge” between a child on the autistic spectrum and a more neurotypical child.
Technologies such as telehealth, telecare, telemedicine, telecoaching are all possible via a personal companion robot such as the ALTAIR range.
This technology has the potential to transform the way people engage in and control their own healthcare, empowering them to manage it in a way that is right for them and has the potential to save the NHS considerable amounts of money, together with better care outcomes.
Robotics in Hydroponic Farming
We are also interested in all robotic applications that can benefit humanity. One of these (important) applications is Robotic indoor Hydroponic Farming (HF). HF has many advantages over traditional farming, it uses less water, it’s completely sterile and it is very space efficient - HF also gives the ability to grow food throughout the year, without being affected by weather variations.
One big problem though is that HF requires more labour (over 50%) than traditional farming. A game changer here could be using robotics, which could well form a farm tech revolution.
The (basic) ALTAIR robot is already well equipped for hydroponic farming as it has "object recognition" to recognise fruit and leaves etc - also its "colour recognition" helps with detection and ripeness etc. This together with being mobile and having arms with 5DOF (degrees of freedom) means that the robot can do a number of repetitive indoor farming tasks. Another big advantage is that the robot can work 24/7 with no time off or breaks etc.
