The Eurecat technology centre is this week showcasing at the Mobile World Congress an assistive robot which helps people at home with a range of daily tasks and can hold a conversation and offer personalised care to users based on monitoring their state of health or mood, furnishing for example instructions for an exercise routine.
Specifically, the robot draws on breakthroughs in generative artificial intelligence to enable complex human-robot interactions, “facilitating understanding, engaging in open dialogues with natural language, and displaying expressiveness, emotions and reasoning to dynamically adjust its behaviour,” says Magí Dalmau, head of Eurecat’s Cognitive Robotics Line.
Connected health solutions
It has been developed as part of the Never Home Alone (NHoA) project in assistive robotics as a solution which can interact in a socially smart way to build an affective relationship with the user and help enhance the quality and independence of users’ lives, in particular people with special needs.
“The robot performs remote health monitoring and cognitive and physical stimulation to maintain and improve healthy lifestyle habits through medication and healthy diet reminders, enable early detection of physical and cognitive deterioration or boredom and suggest appropriate interventions,” says Daniel Serrano, director of Eurecat’s Robotics and Automation Unit.
It additionally “helps to foster interaction with the family and the therapeutic network or with carers in cases where this is needed.”
The NHoA project consortium brings together partners with experience in elderly care along with scientists involved in cognitive, affective and human social robotics and businesses engaged in robotics for social and medical care. In addition to Eurecat, it is made up of Pablo de Olavide University, the Open University of Catalonia, PAL Robotics, LIGHTHOUSE Disruptive Innovation Group, the Extremadura Autonomy and Dependency Care Promotion Service (SEPAD) through FUNDESALUD, the Fundació Sant Joan de Déu and the Parc Sanitari Sant Joan de Déu.
