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Connectivity. Another important issue of a long term domestic test site is that very ofter
it is not possible to rely on a continuous active WiFi internet connection (in particular,
this issue has been detected as a quite critical one in Italy but also in Spain where our
partners are running analogous test sites). Some time, sudden communication break-
downs can leave the robot with no active control. This can be risky since the robot may
remain stuck in an hazardous position possibly preventing movements of the old person
at home. In such cases, the robot should automatically reach and, then, plug into the
docking station. Therefore the idea is to minimize the risk of leaving the robot with no
charge in the middle of an apartment thus guaranteeing an important enhancement of
the system.
People Searching. During an emergency call 5 a client user should take control of
the robot and find the elderly as soon as possible in order to check her health condi-
tions. In such cases, the telepresence platform could be endowed with the capability
of autonomously looking for the elder in the apartment (i.e., increased robot human-
awareness) instead of requiring the operator to (potentially) visit the whole house at
random. Then, once the operator takes the control of the robot, it will automatically
find the proper position to start a new dialogue, minimizing the movement of the robot
in the environment and increasing the effectiveness of the interaction.
People following. During a dialogue, a client user should be allowed to focus her at-
tention to the old person movements/gestures rather than continuously adjusting the
robot position. Then, an interesting feature would be to enable G IRAFF to automati-
cally identify the position of the old person (increased robot human-awareness) and/or
autonomously adapt its position maintaining the person centered on the robot's cam-
era. This clearly would increase the system effectiveness as well as soften the operator
burden, then, enhancing the overall quality of the interaction.
Safety. A final point worth being mentioned is the paramount importance of the safety
of platform basic movements to avoid any scaring movement in proximity of the old
person (increased robot human-awareness). In this respect recent technology improve-
ments for fault-free low level behavior like those described in [25] could potentially
result very useful if integrated.
As a final remark, it is worth underscoring that all the above mentioned cases can be ad-
dressed with a smart integration of functionalities that are within the state-of-the-art of
current autonomous robotics and, then, such advancements are more a matter of imple-
mentation efforts on the MRP platform rather than actual technological development.
5
Conclusions
This paper describes the ongoing work that is trying to assess a robotic telepresence
system within the elderly domain. Two important aspects are presented that can be
5
This is a specific capability that allows to force the usual operational functionalities. It en-
ables an authorized client to bypass the old person authorization and connect with the home
environment.
 
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