A framework for personalized and adaptive socially assistive robotics

Assistive technology is playing a crucial role in supporting caregivers and patients with neurological disorders to carry out home care services. Nevertheless, the technological advances allowing for the automation of such services often lead to systems composed of several devices that make patients not always comfortable when interacting with them, so limiting their effective use. In order to improve the acceptance level of an assistive system, a robotic system is proposed to act as a smart sensor whose functionalities to control its behavior as well as to provide meaningful observations from the input data are modeled as services. The system is supported by a middleware able to automatically schedule a set of home care services that are personalized for each patient considering the personal daily routine, the cognitive status, and the personality profile. In addition, the proposed system is able to react to dynamic changes in the patient's state by modifying the robot behavior and adapting on the fly the set of proposed home care services.