Florence · Multi Purpose Mobile Robot for Ambient Assisted Living

Due to increasing mobility and the ageing society the demand for care will increase significantly, leading to high costs and unrealistic manpower demands. Florence will alleviate this by keeping elderly independent much longer by providing care and coaching services, supported by robots. This will greatly improve the efficiency in care and reduce costs. The second problem addressed by Florence is the acceptance of robots by elderly. For this purpose the project adopts a user-centric approach, by starting with focus-group sessions, having lab-tests in the OFFIS IDEAAL lab, and finally evaluating the services in the Granada AAL living labs. The Florence consortium contains partners from the complete value chain: robot vendors, care providers, and consumer electronics vendors. The consortium positions the service robot as a consumer device, supporting various lifestyle services. In particular the following services will be evaluated in the project: * Social Connectedness: provide access to the social networks, including web-2.0 and synchronous communication tools * Coaching: give feedback on specific activities like physical exercises, and advise on activities of daily life * Care support: log care-related activities at home that are shared among professional or volunteer caretakers. * Safety: use the robot as additional ears and eyes in comfort or safety situations, controlled by service providers or the elderly users.In order to support this multitude of services, the Florence system is based on a service-oriented architecture that provides programmatic interfaces towards the (interaction) capabilities provided by the robot, the home, and remote service providers. Such integration will effectively turn the Florence system into a generic platform for home-services, integrating an autonomous robot with the smart home.