The ambient adaptable living assistant is meeting its users

The need for communication is essential especially for elderly people living alone. In this paper, we introduce the current achievements of the ALIAS project which aims to create a robotic communication platform. This platform will enhance the social inclusion of elderly people by providing them a variety of services to stay in touch with their social envi-ronment. To realize this objective, two major tasks - technical development and user inclu-sion - have to be harmonized by bringing to-gether experts from both fields. The technical realization for creating a robotic platform fea-turing a multimodal communication and an interactive behavior raises challenges from different research directions covering audio and image processing, multimedia technology, human factors, control engineering, etc. The user inclusion has to tackle the problem that elderly people are a heterogeneous group with different wishes and needs. This goal is real-ized by applying different forms of user surveys ranging from questionnaires, interactive work-shops and user trials.The need for communication is essential especially for elderly people living alone. In this paper, we introduce the current achievements of the ALIAS project which aims to create a robotic communication platform. This platform will enhance the social inclusion of elderly people by providing them a variety of services to stay in touch with their social envi-ronment. To realize this objective, two major tasks - technical development and user inclu-sion - have to be harmonized by bringing to-gether experts from both fields. The technical realization for creating a robotic platform fea-turing a multimodal communication and an interactive behavior raises challenges from different research directions covering audio and image processing, multimedia technology, human factors, control engineering, etc. The user inclusion has to tackle the problem that elderly people are a heterogeneous group with different wishes and needs. This goal is real-ized by applying different forms of user surveys ranging from questionnaires, interactive work-shops and user trials.The need for communication is essential especially for elderly people living alone. In this paper, we introduce the current achievements of the ALIAS project which aims to create a robotic communication platform. This platform will enhance the social inclusion of elderly people by providing them a variety of services to stay in touch with their social envi-ronment. To realize this objective, two major tasks - technical development and user inclu-sion - have to be harmonized by bringing to-gether experts from both fields. The technical realization for creating a robotic platform fea-turing a multimodal communication and an interactive behavior raises challenges from different research directions covering audio and image processing, multimedia technology, human factors, control engineering, etc. The user inclusion has to tackle the problem that elderly people are a heterogeneous group with different wishes and needs. This goal is real-ized by applying different forms of user surveys ranging from questionnaires, interactive work-shops and user trials.