ARISE Experiments
CORA
Collaborative Robotics for Enhanced Elderly Care
CORA targets a co-designed collaborative robotics application to enhance interaction in elderly care. Using multimodal inputs, like voice, gestures and IoT data, It supports nurses, optimizes workflows, improves well-being, and reduces costs.
The Challenge: Supporting Europe's Aging Population
Europe is experiencing a profound demographic shift: a rapidly aging population. This trend, while a testament to improved healthcare, brings significant challenges, particularly in elderly care. Care homes and assisted living facilities face chronic labor shortages, leading to immense pressure on professional caregivers and a growing demand for high-quality, personalized care. Traditional care models often struggle to provide continuous monitoring, tailored physical support, and crucial social interaction, leaving many elderly individuals vulnerable to loneliness and reduced well-being. There’s a clear need for solutions that can augment human caregivers, ensuring safety, enhancing quality of life, and optimizing workflows without compromising the human touch.
Our Solution: CORA's Multimodal Robotic Assistant Platform
CORA (Collaborative Robotics Application) is a pioneering project dedicated to revolutionizing elderly care by augmenting and supporting professional caregivers. We are developing a cutting-edge multimodal robotic assistant platform that integrates artificial intelligence, advanced sensors, and collaborative robotics to provide comprehensive support across four key pillars:
- Security: Continuous monitoring through IoT devices and wearables (e.g., heart rate, fall detection, activity anomaly tracking) provides real-time health and environmental insights, triggering immediate alerts and robotic responses when needed.
- Physiotherapy: Robots guide, supervise, and adapt personalized exercise routines, leveraging real-time feedback to improve users’ physical performance and maintain functional capacities.
- Conversational Interaction: Human-like interactions, powered by advanced AI with speech and expression recognition, foster companionship, reduce loneliness, and support mental well-being through empathetic dialogue.
- Collaborative Growth & Standardized Interoperability: By advancing ROS4HRI and leveraging ROS2 Vulcanexus and FIWARE, CORA ensures a robust, scalable, and interoperable system that seamlessly integrates heterogeneous devices and robots, fostering community adoption and knowledge sharing.
Through this human-centric automation, CORA enhances safety, physical health, and emotional well-being, allowing caregivers to focus on tasks requiring empathy and complex decision-making.
Human Centricity: Elevating Care for All
CORA is built on the principles of Industry 5.0, placing both elderly residents and caregivers at the forefront of its design. Our “people-first” approach ensures that technology serves to enhance human roles:
- Personalized Elder Care: Robots adapt physiotherapy routines, provide timely reminders, and offer tailored companionship, addressing individual needs like multimorbidity and social isolation.
- Empowering Caregivers: By automating routine tasks such as vitals monitoring and fall detection, CORA significantly reduces caregiver workload and burnout, allowing them to dedicate more time to empathetic interactions and high-value activities. Real-time data dashboards provide actionable insights, improving response efficiency and decision-making.
- Inclusivity & Diversity: CORA is designed with ergonomic software and intuitive interfaces accessible to diverse skill sets and educational backgrounds. It promotes gender balance and cross-cultural knowledge sharing, ensuring solutions resonate with and benefit all stakeholders, including the predominantly female elderly population.
The ARISE Contribution: Open-Source HRI Modules for the Community
CORA’s core contribution to the ARISE community and the broader robotics ecosystem is the development of reusable, AI-powered robot skills as open-source ROS2 modules. These modules, such as our advanced physiotherapy assistance, will be contributed as open reference implementations to the ARISE catalog.
Key aspects of our contribution include:
- ROS2 Vulcanexus Integration: Ensuring seamless and efficient communication between various components (sensors, AI modules, robots) and facilitating the integration and reconciliation of multimodal data.
- ROS4HRI Advancement: Promoting intuitive Human-Robot Interaction standards for widespread adoption across diverse hardware.
- FIWARE Framework Utilization: Creating a cutting-edge distributed system for robots and IoT devices, complete with a real-time visualization dashboard and a condition monitoring module for health and environmental anomalies.
- Hardware-Agnostic Design: Our open-source, standards-based approach promotes the reuse and longevity of existing robotics infrastructure, minimizing electronic waste and supporting circular economy principles.
By fostering an open innovation ecosystem, CORA accelerates the adoption of human-centric, open-source HRI solutions, uniting diverse technologies for scalable and safe industrial applications.
Impact & Scalability: Addressing a €1 Billion+ Market
The impact of CORA is profound, addressing critical societal and economic needs:
- Market Opportunity: The European elderly care market is vast, with approximately 70,000 care homes. With a projected 980,000 robots deployed in European care homes alone, the total addressable market is estimated to be above €1 Billion per year (combining professional services and subscription fees). Expanding to home care could push this to €6 Billion per year.
- Economic Strain Alleviation: By supporting Europe’s aging population, CORA helps alleviate economic strain on healthcare systems, enhancing the sustainability of elder care infrastructure.
- Job Growth: Stimulates job growth in sectors such as robotics maintenance, AI training, and elderly care, ensuring the benefits of technological advancements are widely distributed.
- Environmental Impact: Promotes the reuse of existing robotics infrastructure and ensures low operational power requirements, contributing to the EU’s climate goals.
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): We aim to reduce residents’ loneliness by 3-5%, improve perceived empathy by 5%, reduce caregiver repetitive task time by 15-20% (saving facilities approximately €21,500 annually), and maintain functional capacities for 90% of residents.
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