PARTNERS - Personal proActive Robot for Therapeutic assistance through Natural Engagement as combination of Reusable

call: H2020-ICT-2015

funding scheme: RIA

activity: ICT-24

Robots are at the edge of a profound change in their presence in our lives provided that they will be accepted in our domestic domain and will be able to establish a safe, supportive, engaging relationship with us. We contend that this relationship can be achieved only with robots able to interact in a human-predictable way to assume a clear, unambiguous, distinct, non-threatening role in our life.This kind of natural, prospective interaction based on mutual understanding assumes a pivotal role in fostering robots inclusion in the society and to address imperative societal challenges. PARTNERS’ goal is to implement this innovative form of natural human-robot interaction and to exploit it in two ways: the first by providing a more natural and effective assistance to aging people at home; the second by supporting activities of daily living with the explicit objective of providing therapeutic assistance and benefit to elderly with Mild Cognitive Deficits caused by neurodegenerative diseases (the principal cause preventing healthy aging). This enhanced form of assistance will be based on constant monitoring of the senior’s condition and with support for social activities in which the assistive robot plays a proactive social role. Therapeutic assistance performed by robots could represent a solution to the general problem of caregiving, being more affordable for the healthcare system and, at the same time, more acceptable and beneficial to people than remotely controlled monitoring systems or detached machines. If effective this therapeutic assistance could slow the neurodegenerative process. To achieve its goal in a technologically effective and socially useful way the effort in PARTNERS is distributed between scientific, technological and social aspects. Moreover, to make the results verifiable and reusable by the whole robotic community the system will be implemented on three different robots of increasing cost-effectiveness using a platform independent infrastructure