An Integrated Approach to Human-Robot-Smart Environment Interaction Interface for Ambient Assisted Living

This paper presents a novel approach to integrating humans and assistive robots into ECHONET-based smart home environments through a multi-modal user interface, toward mitigating nursing care problems in aging societies. We envision a socially assistive humanoid robot companion as a smart care home interface that will support independent living of the disabled and elderly. Especially, we improve and personalize human-robot interaction by endowing the robot with human-like social skills (i.e. natural language processing, user emotion estimation, etc.). Moreover, universAAL, which is an open platform for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solution, is employed to connect various components, devices, and services in the proposed software framework. The ECHONET-based smart home environment, iHouse, with the extended AAL solution provides an efficient way to improve the quality of life of smart home residents. We have confirmed that a humanoid robot companion can gain access to the iHouse network and provide user-requested data and services through verbal and nonverbal interaction with the support of various effective techniques of computational intelligence.