Activities of Daily Living

• Also called: ADL, ADLs
• Category: Control › Human in the loop
• Tags: assistive-robotics, healthcare, human-robot-interaction, rehabilitation, caregiving

The basic self-care tasks people perform every day, such as eating, bathing, dressing, toileting and moving between bed and chair, used in healthcare to measure independence and in robotics to set assistive goals.

Definition

Activities of daily living (ADLs) are the routine self-care tasks a person needs to manage to live independently. The term comes from healthcare and rehabilitation, where the ability to perform ADLs is used to assess older adults and people with disabilities and to plan care. The Katz Index of Independence in Activities of Daily Living, introduced by Sidney Katz and colleagues in 1963, rates six basic activities: bathing, dressing, toileting, transferring (for example from bed to chair), continence and feeding. Other scales, such as the Barthel Index, add items like grooming, walking and climbing stairs.

A second group, instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), covers more complex tasks needed to live alone, such as preparing meals, housekeeping, laundry, shopping, managing medication, using the telephone and handling finances; the Lawton and Brody scale from 1969 is a common measure. The distinction matters because basic ADLs mostly involve close physical contact with the person's body, while many IADLs involve handling objects in the home.

In robotics, ADLs define the target tasks for assistive robots. Feeding, dressing, bathing, grooming such as hair brushing, and transfers all require contact with a person who may have limited strength, mobility or ability to communicate. This makes them some of the hardest manipulation problems: the robot must handle deformable materials such as clothing, hair and food, keep forces low and predictable, adapt to each user's body and preferences, and remain safe if the person moves unexpectedly. IADLs connect more to household manipulation and mobile robotics. Research in this area combines physical human-robot interaction, soft and compliant hardware, force and tactile sensing, and studies with real users and caregivers.

Why it matters

ADLs give assistive robotics a clinically grounded list of tasks that directly affect independence and quality of life, and a shared vocabulary with occupational therapists and caregivers. Framing a robot's purpose in terms of specific ADLs makes it clearer who benefits and how success should be judged.

Key applications

• Robot-assisted feeding for people with upper-limb impairments
• Dressing assistance with deformable garments
• Bathing, grooming and hair care with compliant tools
• Transfer and mobility assistance between bed, chair and toilet
• Wheelchair-mounted robot arms for everyday tasks
• Household robots supporting instrumental activities such as meal preparation

In practice

A research team builds a robot to help with hair brushing, a grooming task that clinical scales include among daily self-care activities. They use a soft, compliant brush end effector and limit contact force with a force-torque sensor at the wrist, slowing or stopping when tangles raise resistance. Before testing with people who have limited arm mobility, they test on wigs and mannequin heads, interview occupational therapists about how caregivers perform the task, and plan user studies that measure comfort, perceived safety and whether the result matches what the person wanted, alongside task success.

Common misconceptions

• ADLs means any household chore — basic ADLs are personal self-care tasks; chores such as cooking, cleaning and shopping are instrumental ADLs
• Assisting with ADLs is mainly a task-success problem — comfort, dignity, safety and the user's own preferences are central to whether help is acceptable
• Full automation is always the goal — many users and clinicians prefer robots that support the person's remaining abilities rather than taking over the task

Who should know this

• Assistive and rehabilitation robotics researchers
• Engineers designing physical human-robot interaction systems
• Occupational therapists and clinicians collaborating on robot design
• Human-robot interaction researchers running user studies

Related technologies

• Katz ADL Index
• Barthel Index
• Lawton IADL Scale
• Wheelchair-Mounted Robot Arms
• Compliant End Effectors

Related terms

• Physical Human-Robot Interaction
• Perceived Safety
• Soft Robotics
• Exoskeleton
• Teleoperation

Related projects

• Reachy Mini: Open-source desktop robot from Pollen and Hugging Face with an expressive 6-DoF head
• RAI: Vendor-agnostic agent framework for ROS 2 robots and physical AI
• Assistive Gym: Physics simulation framework for training assistive robots in caregiving tasks
• OpenExo: Modular open-source exoskeleton for human augmentation and rehabilitation research
• Open-Source Leg: Open-source robotic prosthetic leg platform for research, with hardware and a Python SDK

Videos

• What You Should Know About Activities of Daily Living | A Place for Mom: A Place for Mom