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The advances of the Internet of Things, robotics, and Artificial Intelligence, to give just a few examples, allow us to imagine promising results in the development of smart buildings in the near future. In the particular case of elderly care, there are new solutions that integrate systems that monitor variables associated with the health of each user or systems that facilitate physical or cognitive rehabilitation. In all these solutions, it is clear that these new environments, usually called Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), configure a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) that connects information from the physical world to the cyber-world with the primary objective of adding more intelligence to these environments. This article presents a CPS-AAL for caregiving centers, with the main novelty that includes a Socially Assistive Robot (SAR). The CPS-AAL presented in this work uses a digital twin world with the information acquired by all devices. The basis of this digital twin world is the CORTEX cognitive architecture, a set of software agents interacting through a Deep State Representation (DSR) that stored the shared information between them. The proposal is evaluated in a simulated environment with two use cases requiring interaction between the sensors and the SAR in a simulated caregiving center.

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Path planning is one of the most widely studied problems in robot navigation. It deals with estimating an optimal set of waypoints from an initial to a target coordinate. New generations of assistive robots should be able to compute these paths considering not only obstacles but also social conventions. This ability is commonly referred to as social navigation. This paper describes a new socially-acceptable path-planning framework where robots avoid entering areas corresponding to the personal spaces of people, but most importantly, areas related to human-human and human-object interaction. To estimate the social cost of invading personal spaces we use the concept of proxemics. To model the social cost of invading areas where interaction is happening we include the concept of object interaction space. The framework uses Dijkstra's algorithm on a uniform graph of free space where edges are weighed according to the social traversal cost of their outbound node. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposal to plan socially-accepted paths.

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