Objectives

Walking is an essential activity for humans. It's a lightweight physical activity, that improves circulation, strengthens your muscles and helps you lose weight. Next to this, it allows for social interaction and it releases natural painkilling endorphins to the body, lightening your mood. 

Unfortunately, people with dementia may lose their ability to take walks on their own. They might forget where they are, where they are going or how to get to their destination. In carehomes, they can ask a caretaker to assist them in walking around to avoid these problems, but this implies dependency. They have lost the autonomy and capability to take walks on their own, and we want to help them with that. 

We want to achieve this by creating a robot walking companion who will guide them along their path. With the MiRo robot, a robot resembling a dog, clients should be able to take walks without the help of caretakers. Clients should be able to decide on a destination for which MiRo acts as a guide; MiRo shows the way, makes sure the client stays on it and finds help if anything goes wrong. MiRo helps clients return to their old walking habits, allowing them to take a casual stroll around the building or park, have a chat with someone along the way and then let the client decide where to go next. To allow for this autonomy and control, MiRo should be able to respond to listen to the voice of their client and allow for several voice commands. 

The product vision for this project is therefore defined as follows:

Our MiRo gives people with dementia the autonomy and capability to walk around on their own accord, with only the help of their trusted robot friend.