Group's Core Theoretical Foundation

In this section, we discuss the core theoretical foundation of WAF. We discuss the problem and context, the current situation, and how WAF is supposed to solve the problem. 

People with dementia (PwDs) do not want to sit in care homes all day long. Sometimes, they want to take a walk, which is a good thing. Not only is walking healthy for people in general, but it can also slow cognitive decline as well (Kermoun G. et al, 2010). Unfortunately, their dementia poses some concerns. The main concern is that PwDs might get lost during their walks because they get distracted or forget where they are or what they were doing. Additionally, most PwDs are elderly and may not be physically strong enough to get up if they accidentally fall down. 

One way to solve these problems is to always have a caretaker accompany PwDs during walks, but this is not an ideal solutions. Often, care homes have a limited budget and can therefore only afford limited staff. Some PwDs may also not want to walk with a caretaker as they would like to have some sense of independence and autonomy. Support animals such as dogs could be employed instead, but these require a lot of training and care and they cannot help in every situation. 

Robotic Partner

Since employing support animals is quite costly and requires much maintanance, we thought of employing robot support animal. The ones we looked at are mentioned in Robotic Partner in detail. Briefly, we looked at the MiRo, Spot by Boston Dynamics, Guide Dog robot (Tachi et al., 1985), the Joy for All (Thunberg et al., 2022), Paro Robot, NeCoRo, JustoCat and CuDDler.

Eventually, we picked the MiRo among all of these options as it was the only robotic support animal available in our lab.

Music and Cognition

We looked at including music into our robot, but the striking appearance of a robotic support animal would make it unnatural for it to produce music. However, we did focus on making WAF sound like a real dog to be able to enjoy similar cognitive benefits compared to using a real dog (Marcia S. et al, 2010)/

Design Patterns and Ontology

We opted to incorporate these two concepts, design patterns and ontology into our own project to describe the concepts and relations within a certain domain (Gruber, T. 2018) and to be able to provide a high-level overview of the interaction (Van Diggelen & Johnson, 2019) through Team Design Patterns. Finally, Individual Design Patterns are used to be able to create some reusable pieces of the interaction we imagine.

Importance of Autonomy

As mentioned in Problem Scenario, autonomy is of high importance to PwD as it is a predictor of how likely they are to engage in certain actions (Koestner, R. & Loesier G.F. (2002), p 115) .

Solution

This is where WAF comes into play. WAF is a robotic partner that resembles a dog and is specifically designed to guide PwDs during their walks. It can attract the attention of the PwDs if they get lost and guide them safely back home. In the case that a PwD falls and cannot get back up or some other emergency occurs, it can sound an alarm to attract the attention of nearby caretakers. WAF is cost-effective, efficient, and scalable as it requires little maintenance once it has been employed.