Abstract
The continuous growth of the older population in Europe and the progressive ageing of society worldwide bring about the need for new technological solutions for improving the health, independent living, quality of life and active ageing of older citizens in the Information Society. Quality of life and active aging of elderly people is becoming an essential objective for today’s European societies. In this scope, the term “Ambient Assisted Living” (AAL) is used to refer to the meaningful usage of information and communication technologies, in a way that they can improve the quality of life of older people by offering them safety and comfort to live longer at home and prologue their independence. Many studies have been carried out about empowering the elderly in AAL environments, concerning the aspects of facilitating everyday living, addressing medical conditions and taking appropriate actions in emergency situations. However, an equally important aspect of the elderly's lives is their ...
The continuous growth of the older population in Europe and the progressive ageing of society worldwide bring about the need for new technological solutions for improving the health, independent living, quality of life and active ageing of older citizens in the Information Society. Quality of life and active aging of elderly people is becoming an essential objective for today’s European societies. In this scope, the term “Ambient Assisted Living” (AAL) is used to refer to the meaningful usage of information and communication technologies, in a way that they can improve the quality of life of older people by offering them safety and comfort to live longer at home and prologue their independence. Many studies have been carried out about empowering the elderly in AAL environments, concerning the aspects of facilitating everyday living, addressing medical conditions and taking appropriate actions in emergency situations. However, an equally important aspect of the elderly's lives is their active engagement in their surrounding environment and this implies interacting with different types of technology.Robotic platforms have been around for quite some time since researchers have been trying to overcome essential problems that are related to the nature of robotics and their usage in domestic environments. Successful integration of robotic platforms in a domestic environment has been the result of multidisciplinary efforts from various scientific fields ranging from computer vision to machine learning and information systems. The challenges of these approaches have been so overwhelming that more focus was given to achieving a safe robot existence in a domestic environment than the actual human-robot interaction between the platform and its users. However, since the field of robotics has matured over the last years, a focus shift from the hardware itself to the HRI part of the robot’s existence in such domestic environments is becoming more and more necessary. Furthermore research efforts have focused on incorporating household robotic platforms in such environments under the role of domestic care givers or social companion. The possibilities that are offered by these domestic platforms towards the assistance in everyday life and the wellbeing of the senior citizens are being extensively researched in recent efforts as this scientific field has been drawing considerable attention in recent years. To this end, domestic robotic platforms have been proved to be a valuable piece of technology since they can actively and proactively assist senior citizens in their everyday lives.This work provides a focus shift towards the interaction part of the collaborative co-existence of the elderly and the robot. The main goal is to achieve the development of a commonly understood interaction language. In this novel form of communication, interaction should be tailored to the end users taking into account the specific requirements of each individual, the environmental state but also the capacity of the input/output channels provided by the robotic platform. To this end, the current thesis focuses on creating a universal solution to be used as the corner stone for building multimodal, elderly friendly, interactive applications that target household robots for elderly users. This research work provides developers with the necessary technologies, tools and building blocks for creating easy to use elderly-friendly multimodal applications in AAL environments, with particular focus on robotic platforms, thus increasing their level of adaptation to users’ needs, and, as a consequence, users’ acceptance of these technologies. The applications developed using the proposed framework are inherently friendly to the elder users, while adapting to their needs, the surrounding environment and the context of use. This results in a smooth learning curve, providing increased levels of user satisfaction. Moreover, the use of the proposed framework introduces new interaction modalities such as voice and gestures, enriching and simplifying the interaction experience of the applications. Finally, the framework facilitates effective and efficient development of the supported user interfaces, thus simplifying to a great extent the developer’s work.
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