A Socially Assistive Robot for Elderly Exercise Promotion

Abstract

The population ageing phenomenon leads to an unceasing need for home-based healthcare systems to continuously monitor the elderly’s cognitive and physical health. In this sense, physical activity may be beneficial in preserving cognition in elder life as well as in providing clinicians and therapists with the indicative of elderly’s health condition. Nevertheless, current systems fail to promote and monitor the elderly’s physical activity in their living environments. This paper is aimed at providing a socially assistive robot solution for this task. Since robot acceptance depends to a great extent on its robustness in performing tasks, we have focused on exercise recognition due to its great importance for both clinicians and elderly. For that, two different tasks were carried out. First, an image dataset for physical exercise recognition has been generated. Then, a comparative analysis of several deep learning techniques is presented. This paper reveals a great performance in the exercise recognition of CNN-LSTM with an exercise recognition accuracy of 99.87%.