The paper ‘Social robotic application to support active and healthy ageing’ was presented at the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication – RO-MAN. The paper by S. Cooper, A. Di Fava, O. Villacañas, T. Silva, V.Fernandez-Carbajales, L. Unzueta, M. Serras, L. Marchionni, and F. Ferro 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 by using PAL Robotics’ robot ARI, a high-performance social robot and companion designed for a wide range of multimodal expressive gestures, which is integrated with several Digital Solutions developed inside the SHAPES project. Specifically, in the context of the first Pilot where the robot is being used with the goal of delivering reminders, enabling videocalling, speech interaction and temperature monitoring, to name a few features.

The validation process is discussed, which will take place at Clinica Humana (Mallorca, Spain). 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 the engagement of the user. Read the full paper by clicking here!