Project Overview

Our goal is to develop an autonomous assistive system for the important daily activity of dressing that combines both socially assistive robotics and smart clothing to aid older adults with cognitive impairments. The progressive loss of cognitive function hinders an individual’s ability to perform activities of daily living (ADLs). With respect to the different ADLs, dressing is the most impacted by dementia, and the inability of dressing independently negatively impacts the quality of life for older adults and their families. Furthermore, clothing has a significant influence on self-esteem and social identity of persons living with dementia, and can remain important even in the context of relatively advanced dementia.

We propose a novel autonomous assistive system that provides dressing instructions and monitors the overall dressing activity to provide feedback. The system uniquely combines smart clothing and assistive robotics technologies. A socially assistive robot will help older adults to select clothes based on weather, activity and preferences, and then prompt the user to find and then put on the clothes. The robot will continuously monitor the activity through its multimodal perception system to ensure that the clothes are put on properly, since the robot is able to search for dressing failures including clothes that are put on only partially, backwards or inside-out. The perception system uses an innovative combination of vision and embedded sensors in the clothes.

We expect this system will improve the quality of life of older adults by promoting their independence, and reduce the burden on caregivers. This proof-of-concept project will pave the way for needed research in the emerging areas of smart clothing and assistive robotics for healthcare. This project fits well within the AGE-WELL WP3 TECH-FAI Workpackage, which focuses on developing technologies for supporting functional autonomy and independence.