Abstract:

The need to be able to interact with people or services in a safe way and with the health guarantee has become evident with the appearance of COVID-19, reducing to the maximum the need to interact physically and use minimal contact with any shared surface or object.

In the specific case of the elderly or people with special needs, alternative approaches have been sought in order to reduce this contact and exposure to crowded areas or closed spaces, especially avoiding physical contact and respecting social distance.

The developed project includes an application on the platform of the social robot Pepper (https://www.softbankrobotics.com/emea/en/pepper) in order to establish a secure multimodal social relationship. This interaction will be performed through natural communication (visual, vocal and touch) where the social robot or a virtual avatar or interlocutor (through its integrated Tablet) help to perform the common actions of a user in their personal environment at home.

The functionality of the application is aimed at maintaining the social relations of the elderly user (fostering connection with family members, suggestion of ludic activities, training or recreational activities, rehabilitation exercises, etc .) and their health (medication administration reminders, medical dates or similar).

In this first phase, the user experience will be assessed through several tests on control users to evaluate the viability of the application.

Keywords:

Social robotics, ludic activities, training recreational, health supervision.