Development of Human-Centered Social Robot with Embedded Personality for Elderly Care

The paper regards to research and development of a human-centric, social, care-robot for elderly people and persons with reduced ability to improve quality of their life and to create conditions for more independent living at their homes. Paper presents new mechanical design of personal robot assistant operating in an informational structured environment arranged in the form of a smart house. The paper suggests mechanical structure of the robot that meets ergonomic standards adapted to the low mobile or immobile patients. Fine ergonomic characteristics of robot allow better support for low mobile patients while walking and relatively easy to use services offered by the robot such as: adding of items, medications, personal belongings, serving drinks and meals, connecting and use of the Internet or social networks, phone calls to family members or friends, use Skype services, etc. The robot has a built-in security features such as emergency for medical services, emergency call to family members, etc. Proposed care-robot includes artificial intelligence additionally enhanced by the emotional intelligence interface that enables better adaptability to different personality profiles. In the paper, the care-robot is put in the context of a cloud system that enables enhanced sensing, fast communication between agents as well as real-time decision making and operation. The way of personality embodiment with care-robot is described in the paper and the methodology proposed was explained by an example-the use case entitled "broken glass". In the conclusion, main novelties and research objectives are stressed out as well as the future work is proposed.