Collection

Social robots for personalized, continuous and adaptive assistance

Submission status
Closed
Increased life expectancy is an achievement of modern societies in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Countries (and recently in developing Countries) thanks to the technological progress in health, living places and quality of food. An aggregate consequence of the prolongation of the life-time span is the growth of an ageing society, testified by several demographic studies. The study of the consequences of an ageing society on the future of social living had recently been considered by large world institutions (WHO, UN, EU, etc), which addressed and designed programs for social and technological development taking into account the impact of the ageing society in the future of the world. Within this framework, topics such as “prolonging independent living”, “ageing well”, active and healthy aging, or “social inclusion” are increasingly becoming more and more relevant. The incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases during ageing impose the need for innovative approaches to the assistance, including the ability of self-management, which has become an increasingly important requirement of healthcare in Europe and beyond. Being able to selfmanage one's own health requires high levels of health literacy and continuous collaboration between persons- carers and health professionals. In order for people to manage health on a long term basis, they need to be able to understand and assess health related information to make informed decisions. They need to be able to collaborate closely with health care professionals, ask the right questions and take control of their circumstances related to their health condition. Hence, innovative interventions embedded with ehealth applications are extremely important to improve the Active and Health Ageing of the population and health literacy of this population. Several initiatives all over the world took care of these aspects focusing on the problem of developing a new generation of innovative technologies to face an ageing society and its growing needs. Novel assistive solutions and technologies are indeed necessary to properly deal with the increasing demand for personalized assistance and to support users in different scenarios. Such solutions should be capable of effectively merging heterogeneous and potentially conflicting requirements coming from different stakeholders bridging the gap between health needs of users and clinical and social requirements. In this context, the increasing demand for personalized, continuous and adaptive assistance of an ageing population can be effectively addressed only through a multidisciplinary approach. The synergetic contribution of different research areas like, e.g., Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet-of-Things (IoT), Robotics and Social Science is crucial to deliver innovative and impactful results and technologies. This special issue aims at collecting contributions from experts (scholars, researchers, Ph.D students as well as practitioners) in Artificial Intelligence and Social Robotics and other crossing disciplines involved in the development of innovative and effective researches and technologies for the ageing society and assistance in general. The special issue will promote a multi-disciplinary view by collecting knowledge and experiences from heterogeneous disciplines and also experiences from stakeholders in order to show how efforts from technological and non-technological actors would add value to the promotion of innovative social assistive systems.

Editors

  • Gabriella Cortellessa, CNR-ISTC, Italy Gabriella Cortellessa, CNR-ISTC, Italy , 

    Gabriella Cortellessa, CNR-ISTC, Italy

    research scientist at ISTC-CNR. In 2003, she spent one year at Carnegie Mellon University working at the synthesis of user-oriented explanations within mixed-initiative solvers. Her research spans mixed-initiative problem solving, methods for evaluating intelligent systems, evaluation methods for Human Computer Interaction and Human Robot Interaction, user studies. She designed the user interaction front end of the deployed tools developed for ESA and led the WP on Dynamic User Modelling in the EU PANDORA project. She has worked in the AAL area since 2007 addressing user evaluation in the RoboCare project.

  • Laura Fiorini Laura Fiorini , 

    Laura Fiorini

    M.S. Biomedical Engineering 2012, PhD Biorobotics, 2016, is a postodoctoral researcher at the University of Florence, Department of Industrial Engineering, Florence, Italy. She received the M.Sc. Degree in Biomedical Engineering at University of Pisa in 2012 (full marks, cum laude). She obtained a Ph.D. in Biorobotics (full marks, cum laude) at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, in 2016 with a fellowship offered by Telecom Italia discussing a thesis entitled “Cloud Robotic Services for Assisted Living Application”.

  • Roberta Bevilacqua Roberta Bevilacqua , 

    Roberta Bevilacqua

    Psychologist, psychotherapist, specialized in Clinical Psychology at the Bologna University, with a master in Clinical Neuropsychology at the Padua University and a four-year specialization in cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy. Research interests: technology acceptance, AI, social and rehabilitation robotics, usability, coaching, user-centred and participatory design, health and eHealth literacy.

  • Alessandro Umbrico Alessandro Umbrico  &

    Alessandro Umbrico

    M.S. Engineering Computer Science 2012, Phd Computer Science and Automation, 2017, is a Fixed-Term researcher at CNR – Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (CNR-ISTC). Alessandro has spent a period as a guest PhD student at Osnabruck University investigating hybrid approaches to planning. His research topics cover the development of planning and execution techniques suitable for real-world applications. He is also interested in investigating interactions between knowledge representation and planning and, in applying plan-based control techniques in manufacturing contexts for Human-Robot Collaboration.

  • Rainer Wieching Rainer Wieching

    Rainer Wieching

    Holds an MSc & PhD in Exercise Physiology. He has worked for 10 years as senior research scientist at USI. During the 15 years of his professional career before that time at USI, he has headed a health care SME, being responsible for technical, medical, and scientific aspects in global pharma marketing and medical education, focusing especially on prescription drugs (cardiovascular, oncology), evidence-based medicine (clinical trials, guidelines), and medical technology (ultrasound).

Articles (5 in this collection)