Comprehensive Geria.tcic Assessment ( CGA) is an integrated clinical process to evaluate the frailty of elderly persons in order to create therapy plans that improve their quality of life. For robotizing these tests, we are designing and developing CLA RC, a mobile robot able to help the physician to capture and manage data during the CGA procedures, mainly by autonomously conducting a set of predefined evaluation tests. Built around a shared internal representation of the outer world, the architecture is composed of softwa,r e modules able to plan and generate a stream of actions, t.o execute actions emanated from the representation or to update this by including/removing items at different abstraction levels. Percepts, actions and intentfons ooming from all software modules are grounded within th.is unique representation. This allows the robot to react to unexpected events and to modify the course of action accord ing to the dynamics of a scenario built around the interaction with the patient. The paper describes the architecture of the system as well as the preliminary user studies and evaluation to gather new user requirements.

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies can play an important role in helping elderly people achieve healthy ageing and maintain their autonomy. The balance quality tester (BQT) is a device for remote assessment of balance quality for older people at risk of falling. It has been validated both from a technical and a clinical perspective. However, for the BQT to be considered as a useful tool for long-term home monitoring of people with balance impairments, two issues are at stake: ease-of-use on a regular basis and trust in the validity of the data acquisition. To ensure this utility, a usage study has been made to understand the needs and values of different stakeholders: elders at risk of falling and their entourage, as well as health professionals. One main insight was the need to redesign the BQT, so as to fit the needs concerning ease-ofuse and trust in validity of data acquisition. Using a Human-centred and Participatory Design approach, the redesigning work relates to hardware design, interaction design, interface design, and most of all to standardizing the protocol of stepping-on the BQT. This paper describes the results, i.e. the design recommendations, and discusses the collaborative and iterative design process, which allowed the successful redesign of the BQT.

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One of the aims of cognitive robotics is to endow robots with the ability to plan solutions for complex goals and then to enact those plans. Additionally, robots should react properly upon encountering unexpected changes in their environment that are not part of their planned course of actions. This requires a close coupling between deliberative and reactive control flows. From the perspective of robotics, this coupling generally entails a tightly integrated perceptuomotor system, which is then loosely connected to some specific form of deliberative system such as a planner. From the high-level perspective of automated planning, the emphasis is on a highly functional system that, taken to its extreme, calls perceptual and motor modules as services when required. This paper proposes to join the perceptual and acting perspectives via a unique representation where the responses of all software modules in the architecture are generalized using the same set of tokens. The proposed representation integrates symbolic and metric information. The proposed approach has been successfully tested in CLARC, a robot that performs Comprehensive Geriatric Assessments of elderly patients. The robot was favourably appraised in a survey conducted to assess its behaviour. For instance,