Professor R. Kim, a geriatrics specialist at St. Marien Hospital, and Alexander Paul of Entrance Robotics discuss using Pepper and Robot Care to support older patients, with host Nicholas at SoftBank Robotics Europe in Paris.
Professor R. Kim became interested in robotics while exploring emotional support and therapy for people with cognitive difficulties. At St. Marien Hospital, Pepper had been in use for about a year and a half as the team studied how patients and staff responded to it. The hospital treats older people with complex needs, including dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and recovery after falls or strokes.
Alexander Paul described Robot Care as a platform that combines skills to suit each facility, including games, music, exercise, video calls, and emotion detection. Pepper leads concentration games, quizzes, stories, and group fitness routines. The team hopes to add analytics that could help staff track patients’ progress and include information in clinical documentation.
The team is exploring whether repeated emotion detection could help clinicians understand patients who have difficulty describing their mood or pain. Kim said consistent observations might offer additional information about therapy, medication, pain, depression, or dementia, but the approach was still under investigation. A separate project with Fraunhofer and Logarithmo was studying camera-based patient recognition and contactless measurement of vital signs.
Kim said the hospital had not yet seen time savings because staff still needed to accompany Pepper and compare its emotion readings with their own observations. Staff acceptance was high, and the team reported that one person could lead activities for groups of eight to ten patients. Paul said fitness sessions could create a five-to-ten-minute window for a staff member to give individual attention to others.
Pepper was not yet able to navigate independently between arbitrary rooms, and the hospital planned to keep it in a known activity area so it would not disturb patients who needed rest. Paul said facilities could customize the platform, while patient data and face recognition required careful handling under GDPR. The hospital used consent and information forms and kept data locally; Paul said the platform could also run on a facility’s own servers.
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