Key challenges for developing a Socially Assistive Robotic (SAR) solution for the health sector

To help meet the health and caregiving needs of an increasingly ageing population, Engineering is developing SARA, a ’’Socially Assistive Robotic Solution for Ambient assisted living’’, as an extension of its commercial AREAS Enterprise Resource Planning suite for the Health sector. SARA is a complex distributed home automation and robotics system providing health monitoring and (socially interactive) assistance in daily living tasks to the elderly (and their caregivers) at home – with the aim to prolong their autonomy and delay their institutionalization. While advances in artificial intelligence and internet-of-things technologies are converging to make SARA (and similar automated solutions) ever more technically feasible and economically viable, there nevertheless remain significant technological challenges to overcome. This paper introduces SARA, describes some of the key challenges faced in its development, and explains how smart end-to-end IoT interoperability, connectivity and security can help tackle these challenges.