The Study on Robot Motion Planning in Recreation for Elderly Person with Dementia

In nursing homes, various recreations are carried out in order to prevent the progression of a dementia.But effective recreations have not designed, because the relationship between the effect and the content of recreation has not been proved quantitatively. In this paper, we proposed how to design the content of recreation according to the inferior capability of each elderly person. In order to propose it, we develop the relationship model between an action factor during a recreation and an ability of elderly person by papers review. This model means what types of action the elderly person should do in order to improve the inferior ability. And we develop the correlation model between abilities (memorization, emotion control, cognition, etc). We designed the content of recreation with animal-robot by using these2models. As a result of case study in nursing home, we confirmed the effect of the designed recreation, because the target ability of designed recreation is improved according to increase the occurrence rate of the target action factor. Moreover, this result means that the validity of developed2models has been proved partly. The achievement of this paper is to develop the framework for the content design of recreation to meet abilities of each elderly person.