Design guide for Kansei Spiritual Therapeutic Robot Interaction (KS-TRI) / Nik Nor Nabila Nik Ismail

Malaysia is expected to become an aging nation by 2030 in which 15% of the population is aged 60 years and above which entails a rise in the number of elderly in the nation, and challenges they faced in their daily lives. The trend shows that there is already an increasing demand of care giving, especially for Alzheimer cases. Result obtained from the preliminary study showed that the early stages of the Alzheimer’s disease affects elderly’ memory in terms of performing tasks in their daily lives and need assistance and support from family members or caregivers. The result also revealed that they often forget spiritual practices and when it happened, they become sad, moody and sometimes act fiercely. Meanwhile, robot interaction has been introduced in countries such as Japan and Denmark to improve the elderly emotion. In Malaysia, several researches have been performed, but none has looked at the feasibility of robot interaction as potential solution to their emotional wellbeing. Hence, this research aims to propose solution for the matter with the use of robot interaction focusing on spiritual aspect, which was suggested as the cause of negative emotion from preliminary study. The objectives of this research are, i) to identify the suitable spiritual emotion words for the Kansei Spiritual Therapeutic Robot Interaction (KS-TRI) by adoption of KJ method, ii) to determine spiritual design elements for the KS-TRI by interview method, iii) to propose a design guide for spiritual practices in the KS-TRI by using in-depth interview, and emotion checklist. The investigation employs 5 elderly, 4 elderly experts, spiritual experts, and robot experts, and 1 caregiver. The findings revealed that the use of robot interaction with embedded spiritual design elements can become therapeutic medium and derive positive emotions as it helps improve their memory and thus helps their spiritual practices, and enable the research to propose design guide for KS-TRI. This KS-TRI is significant for elderly suffering from early stages of the Alzheimer’s disease where they benefit the technology in raising their positive emotion and performing spiritual practices. This research has its limitation where it only focuses on Malay Muslim elderly, and thus the result is bias to this target group, and cannot be used to the general elderly. Further research is recommended to a wider population and scope to enhance the findings and design a more generalized design guide for KS-TRI.