Situated Agents and Humans in Social Interaction for Elderly Healthcare: From Coaalas to AVICENA.

Assistive Technologies (AT) are an application area where several Artificial Intelligence techniques and tools have been successfully applied to support elderly or impeded people on their daily activities. However, approaches to AT tend to center in the user-tool interaction, neglecting the user's connection with its social environment (such as caretakers, relatives and health professionals) and the possibility to monitor undesired behaviour providing both adaptation to a dynamic environment and early response to potentially dangerous situations. In previous work we have presented COAALAS, an intelligent social and norm-aware device for elderly people that is able to autonomously organize, reorganize and interact with the different actors involved in elderly-care, either human actors or other devices. In this paper we put our work into context, by first examining what are the desirable properties of such a system, analysing the state-of-the-art on the relevant topics, and verifying the validity of our proposal in a larger context that we call AVICENA. AVICENA's aim is develop a semi-autonomous (collaborative) tool to promote monitored, intensive, extended and personalized therapeutic regime adherence at home based on adaptation techniques.