Facilitating Remote Communication Between Senior Communities with Telepresence Robots.

Rapid aging and low birthrate of the society is a big issue especially in suburban district of Japan. Since social participation is one of the major factors of well being, online communication helps the elderly in suburban community maintain social relationships by receiving various kinds of services provided from urban area. Our research group introduced a remote IT classroom for senior citizens as an example of local senior communities support each other by connecting those communities through the Internet. This remote IT classroom is based on video conferencing system, and the IT lecturer and his assistants in urban district taught participants live in suburban district how to use tablet devices. From previous study, assistants pointed out that they had difficulties in establishing conversation with the students. Thus we propose the use of telepresence robots in order to overcome this issue. Results from the remote IT classroom indicated that the application of telepresence robots lowered the barrier for initiating conversation between remote assistants and local students.