HAPPIER
The HAPPIER project will try to improve the sustainability of elderly care by supporting Active and Healthy Ageing (AHA) delegating some aspects of human-based elderly care to robots. The main purpose of this project is to provide seamless and unobtrusive robotic support for all the three main pillars of AHA: (1) Communication & Participation, (2) Health & Prevention, (3) Safety and data protection. This will be accomplished by deploying a variety of assistive robots for different purposes, all connected via a secure Cloud-based system to the Internet of Things (IoT) in the environment, including health-related wearables sensor systems as well as ambient assisted living solutions.
In particular, the key approach is to improve the user experience during Human Robot Interaction (HRI), incorporating in the basic technical AHA support functions emotional interaction via non-verbal, empathetic elements, also reflecting the cultural peculiarities of target users. Emotional interaction will help the robots to establish a natural social bond with the user, giving the robots more persuasive means to convince the user to follow specific medical directives and general AHA guidelines to keep a healthy lifestyle. This project aims at developing a complete set of AHA supporting behaviors, data collection and analysis algorithms for PEPPER, the most expressive human-like robot available on the mass market in Japan since two years ago and in Germany since 2016; and for other more specialized supporting robots.
