BACKGROUND: Socially assistive robotics for elderly care is a growing field. However, although robotics has the potential to support elderly in daily tasks by offering specific services, the development of usable interfaces is still a challenge. Since several factors such as age or disease-related changes in perceptual or cognitive abilities and familiarity with computer technologies influence technology use they must be considered when designing interfaces for these users. OBJECTIVE: This paper presents findings from usability testing of two different services provided by a social assistive robot intended for elderly with cognitive impairment: a grocery shopping list and an agenda application. The main goal of this study is to identify the usability problems of the robot interface for target end-users as well as to isolate the human factors that affect the use of the technology by elderly. METHODS: Socio-demographic characteristics and computer experience were examined as factors that could have an influence on task performance. A group of 11 elderly persons with Mild Cognitive Impairment and a group of 11 cognitively healthy elderly individuals took part in this study. Performance measures (task completion time and number of errors) were collected. RESULTS: Cognitive profile, age and computer experience were found to impact task performance. Participants with cognitive impairment achieved the tasks committing more errors than cognitively healthy elderly. Instead younger participants and those with previous computer experience were faster at completing the tasks confirming previous findings in the literature. CONCLUSIONS: The overall results suggested that interfaces and contents of the services assessed were usable by older adults with cognitive impairment. However, some usability problems were identified and should be addressed to better meet the needs and capacities of target end-users. C. Granata et al. / Robot services for elderly with cognitive impairmentIn elderly individuals, cognitive impairment most commonly concerns memory, but it can affect other aspects of cognition such as attention, language, perceptual skills, orientation and problem solving. While mild cognitive deficits can interfere with the performance of instrumental activities of daily life (e.g., driving, managing finances or medication), severe deficits often lead to complete disability. Thus, older adults suffering from cognitive impairment may require varying degrees of assistance to perform daily tasks.Assistive Technology (AT) refers to technological products, services or systems used to improve functional capacity and social behavior of individuals with disabilities, including age-related cognitive or physical deficits [5]. AT for elderly with cognitive impairment serves different purposes [6]: assistance on daily tasks, communication and social interaction, management of behavioral symptoms, health monitoring, stimulation and entertainment, among others. Robotics has contributed to the development of AT for older adults with the des...

This paper presents an environment for design of interactive behaviors for social robots. Its structure consists of three levels which are: perception, decision and action. Their principles are briefly described and we detail more specifically implementation of people searching and monitoring in cluttered environments. We describe in particular the methods for people detection, state estimation and trajectory generation for interactive monitoring. We demonstrate experimentally that the designed reasoning system is able to regulate the robot behavior in complex situations. The robustness of the framework is evaluated experimentally for person following in his home space that may lead the system to lose the person detection because of occlusions and to use shortcuts.