A Preliminary Study on Preventive Care System Based on Game Playing with Communication Robots

In Japan, increases in medical costs and decreases in health care personnel are serious national problems. Against this background, an approach called "preventive care," which aims to prevent increases in the number of persons requiring nursing care, received a lot of attention in recent years. This paper proposes a system for preventive care through game playing with robots. The robots are programmed to behave like humans based on the concept of Human-Agent Interaction. In addition, reinforcement learning is applied to the robots in order to encourage users\´ competitive spirit and to find an exercise load suitable for each individual user. The proposed system thus allows users to enjoy exercising continuously through match-ups against the robots. With the cooperation of local governments and health and welfare facilities, we investigated the basic characteristics and utility of the proposed system by subjective evaluation targeting the elderly.