Rah-rah for elderly in rehabilitation with this pet robot dog

21 Jul 2022

A project by SP beat 15 others to bag the top prize in the technology category at this year's National Assistive and Rehabilitation Technology Student Innovation Challenge. The team designed a pet robot dog named SParkle that encourages seniors to do their therapy exercises. It is also part of a system which allows caregivers and therapists to monitor the seniors' exercise data over the cloud. Ms Gina Teh, 20, one of four SP students involved in the project, said: "We wanted to create a new platform to reduce the monotony of rehabilitation exercises, as the activities in our project can be customised for each user. This would encourage the elderly to keep going in their rehabilitation journey." Dr Jaichandar, a specialist in biomedical engineering at SP, also shared that the team is working on improving the response time of the pet robot, and hope to develop more prototypes to be rented to other senior activity centres.