Towards Long-Term Deployment of a Mobile Robot for at-Home Ambient Assisted Living of the Elderly

Abstract

In a social and economic context characterized by a constantly aging population, the research for new technologies able to assist elderly people is becoming a hot topic. In this paper we illustrate the main components of the European project MoveCare, a multi-actor framework designed to assist pre-frail elders living alone. The main component of the system is an assistance mobile robot that provides the user with a set of functionalities to support cognitive and social stimulation, assistance, and transparent monitoring. In view of the long-term deployment of the autonomous robotic system to be carried out for three months inside the houses of end-users, we present in this paper a preliminary experimental evaluation of the system within an apartment, focusing on the evaluation of the platform under the perspective of long-term autonomy (LTA).