Social robotic application to support active and healthy ageing

With the world population ageing and with the number of healthcare users needing assistance and support increasing, healthcare is becoming more costly and, as such, the need to optimise and support independent living for older people is of paramount importance. This paper reviews the user requirements and challenges that are relevant to older adults who prefer to age healthily at home, and how socially assistive robots (SAR) can be used to help them. The main focus is placed on the social robotic application developed for the H2020 SHAPES project to promote Smart Living Environment for healthy ageing. The solution is based on the newest PAL Robotics’ robot ARI, a high-performance social robot and companion designed for a wide range of multi-modal expressive gestures, gaze and personalised behaviour, which is integrated via several Digital Solutions developed within the SHAPES project to improve human-robot interaction and user acceptability for independent living support tasks. The validation process will take place over the coming months at Clinica Humana (Mallorca, Spain), which is a private clinic that provides hospital care to retirement homes, communities and home-bound patients. A description of the scenario definition is presented in the paper, together with the validation plan that will be executed during the pilot assessments and the measures that will be taken to improve user engagement.