An Ontology-based Home Care Service Robot for Persons with Dementia

In this paper, we introduce an ontology-based home care service robot that can provide personalized care for people who are in the early stage of dementia. The hardware and software framework encompassed in the proposed service robot was developed to carry out care services in their daily life at home. Specifically, to generate adaptive task plans in diverse caring situation, context reasoner and ontological model of dementia are included. Ontology includes various concepts that are related with the knowledge of caring dementia patient: dementia, dementia symptom, environment of around patient, and situation during patient's daily life. To evaluate if the proposed service robot could provide appropriate care service or not, experimental care scenario for helping a person with dementia take medicine was tried in the lab environment. Although tasks of the robot required for the experiment are rather simple, we have demonstrated that the robot could provide a personalized service that may be beneficial to dementia patient, family members and caregivers. In the future, we will add more care knowledge in the ontology and further develop a variety of care services. Additionally, we are going to test the care service robot in a real environment with actual dementia patient.