Prospective applications of assistive robotics for the benefit of population groups

Abstract

The development of robotics has reached various fields of application such as the assistance field, where robots support people with different abilities in different activities to provide independence, comfort and interaction, even improving their self-esteem and quality of life. The objective is to identify the main benefits of the application of assistive robotics achieved to project its future fields of action. For this purpose, the Scopus database is used to find documents related to assistive robotics, which are filtered by publication date and according to the elimination criteria determined by the authors, and then bibliometric networks are constructed using VOSviewer. Finally, the main findings are analyzed and presented according to their area of application. Five areas of application of assistive robotics are identified that benefit children, the elderly, provide hospital assistance, help people with disabilities or support therapy and rehabilitation work, developments that allow the formulation of areas for future study. It is concluded that there are many advances in assistive robotics that demonstrate robotic development and provide assistance to a particular population, but more work is still needed to increase the number of beneficiaries, reduce costs and expand research in the areas mentioned and to be developed.