Studies on necessary condition of companion robot in the RAA application

Abstract

This paper describes desirable properties that the companion robots should have for the application to robot assisted activity / robot assisted therapy (RAA/RAT) from the standpoint of robotics. Although animal assisted activity / robot assisted therapy (AAA/AAT) give us much better effectiveness in the hospital and old-peoples nursing home for the present time, these institutes have been looking forward to RAA/RAT because of difficulties in AAA/AAT in handling of living animals and prevention of epidemics. From the fieldwork in pediatrics ward and the nursing home using the robots on-the-market that can be partly brought up, we extracted what kind of function is effective in communication between patient-robot, patient-nurse, and patient-patient. This paper also mentions how to actualize such function by software modeling and programming.