Co-designing a robotic exercise assistant
Care-home residents often spend much of the day sedentary, which can harm health and reduce independence. Exercise therapy can help maintain function, but limited care staff makes individual supervision difficult to provide.
AI@WZC explored a robotic assistant to support exercise in this setting. Residents and researchers co-designed the assistant across three sessions:
- Problem understanding: clarifying residents' needs and challenges around exercise.
- Ideation: exploring ideas for the assistant together.
- Pilot testing: trying the robotic assistant with residents in the care-home setting.
Related research developed a single-camera method to recognise exercises, estimate joint movements and derive measures such as repetition count, exercise duration and range of motion. The PLOS Digital Health study evaluates this approach for exercise assessment in older care-home residents.