Dr. Rebecca Stafford – How I spent 4 years of

my life

The Healthbots project: Contributions of the PhD candidate

The results of this PhD are very much a team effort: the Healthbots team.

Healthbots is a joint research project between UniServices, the commercial branch of the

University of Auckland, and the Electronic and Telecommunications Research Institute in

Korea (ETRI).

The aim of the Healthbots project is to combine ETRI's Robot expertise with the University of

Auckland’s research capabilities; while partnering with Korean and New Zealand

Companies. The research objective is to evolve the healthcare available for older people by

custom designed robotic technology. Applications are being designed to help with repetitive

tasks such as vital sign monitoring, dispensing of medications, and fall detection. These

objectives are being achieved by research into the areas of health informatics, speech

generation, vital signs monitoring, robots in organizations, medication management support,

psychological factors, wireless propagation, indicators to falls in older people, and

integration.

The multi-disciplinary Healthbots team consists of over 20 researchers; bringing expertise

from a range of disciplines including electrical and computer engineering, health psychology,

gerontology, speech production, health informatics, and computer science.

The PhD candidate’s role within this complex collaborative project could be broadly divided

into two areas: designing, conducting and analysing Human Robot Interaction (HRI) trials,

and assisting the engineers develop the robot software.

The PhD candidate made a variety of contributions to the three HRI studies described in this

thesis. These included collaborating with other Healthbots members, reviewing the literature,

trial design, measure selection/creation, participant recruitment, pilot testing, liaising with

retirement village staff, conduction of trials, administration of measures, collecting, entering

and analysing data, and writing publications. Note, while the PhD candidate played a key

role in these project events, important input was provided by other Healthbots team

members.

The PhD candidates’ views and ideas about eldercare robots were informed in assisting the

engineers develop the robot software. This assistance took the form of analysis of software

requirements, developing the storyboards, robot script development, implementations of the

software, and ‘elder-friendly’ usability testing – including continuity and error checking.

Of all the robot’s healthcare modules, the PhD candidate was particularly involved in the

development of the robot’s entertainment module. In addition to the work described above,

creating the robot’s entertainment modules involved reviewing the literature, consultation

with older people on their entertainment preferences, collation of entertainment material, and

pilot testing to assess entertainment value and acceptability of the material.