ARISE Experiments
EMBRACE
Revolutionizing Assisted Living with AI-Powered Collaborative Robotics
We develop an AI-powered cobot system for assisted living, enhancing care with real-time emotional distress, posture & gesture recognition. Combining multimodal communication & open-source tools, we empower users, caregivers & healthcare systems.
The Challenge: Unintuitive Interactions & Growing Care Needs
The assisted living sector faces a pressing challenge: meeting the growing care needs of Europe’s aging population amidst a shortage of caregivers. While scalable technologies such as AI and robotics offer potential solutions, current Human-Machine Interactions (HMI) in robotics often remain rigid and unintuitive. Although chatbots have improved verbal communication, most robotic systems still rely on traditional input methods, failing to adapt effectively to human behavior, emotions and diverse needs. This lack of multimodal communication means care systems are not truly adaptive, leaving critical gaps in personalized support, interoperability and seamless caregiver integration. The result is an assisted living sector struggling to deliver efficient, cost-effective and truly human-centric solutions.
Our Solution: EMBRACE's Adaptive AI-Powered Robotic System
EMBRACE develops an AI-powered robotic system specifically designed for personalized rehabilitation in assisted living. The system leverages multimodal communication to recognize and respond in real-time to a user’s posture and gestures, providing adaptive and tailored support. This innovative approach reflects Industry 5.0’s human-centric vision, aiming to enhance user engagement and well-being.
Key concepts include:
- Multimodal Communication: Going beyond verbal cues, the system integrates non-verbal signals like gestures and signs of emotional distress, enabling robotic systems to respond intuitively and adapt their interactions.
- Real-time Supportive Tools: Caregivers are equipped with a supportive tool, allowing them to be in the loop when needed and focus on human-to-human connections.
- Privacy-First Local Data Processing: EMBRACE focuses on processing information locally, ensuring privacy by design without the need to send sensitive data to the cloud.
- Open-Source Middleware: Built on robust open-source frameworks like FIWARE and ROS2, the system ensures scalability, interoperability and seamless platform integration across diverse environments.
This comprehensive approach allows EMBRACE to enhance senior care while empowering both users and caregivers with intelligent, responsive tools.
Human Centricity: Enhancing Well-being and Empowerment
EMBRACE places human-centricity at its core, addressing the unmet needs of senior users, caregivers and the broader healthcare system. Inclusivity is ensured by actively involving people from different backgrounds throughout the design and validation phases. A gender-sensitive approach and multimodal communication improve accessibility, making the system adaptable across cultures and responsive to diverse physical and cognitive needs. This helps strengthen independence and encourage long-term use.
- For Seniors: EMBRACE offers personalized rehabilitation exercises with adaptive feedback that support autonomy, motivation and active participation in recovery. By responding to each individual’s physical and emotional needs, the system fosters engagement and improves health outcomes.
- For Caregivers and Health Professionals: A human-in-the-loop approach equips them with practical tools to prescribe, monitor and adjust rehabilitation programs. This reduces caregiver workload, minimizes errors and frees up time for high-value, empathetic interactions.
- For the Wider Healthcare System: EMBRACE supports the shift towards preventive and personalized care, complementing traditional rehabilitation pathways and strengthening long-term health management.
The ARISE Contribution: Reusable Open-Source Robotic Skills
EMBRACE’s significant contribution to the ARISE community and the wider robotics ecosystem lies in developing and publishing reusable ROS2 skills to the ARISE Open Library. These modular Human-Robot Interaction functionalities, implemented as ROS2 modules, enable seamless integration of multimodal capabilities like posture or gesture recognition.
The commitment to open standards and modularity ensures:
- Scalability & Interoperability: Adherence to ARISE standards ensures EMBRACE can scale for uses in other industrial settings, such as manufacturing or logistics, supporting worker well-being.
- Adaptive Condition Monitoring: The use of FIWARE components enables real-time condition monitoring and data management, supporting applications such as automated alerts and dashboards in both healthcare and industrial contexts.
- Accelerated Development: By leveraging open-source ROS2 modules and scalable distributions, EMBRACE can cut development costs and reduce system integration time for future applications.
Impact & Scalability: Driving Positive Change
EMBRACE is designed to deliver meaningful impact across several dimensions:
- Social Impact: Addresses a key societal challenge for the aging population and is contributing to healthier, more sustainable living environments. It strengthens independence and reduces the burden on healthcare systems.
- Economic Impact: By enabling home rehabilitation, the system can reduce costs associated with outpatient rehabilitation. It also fosters sustainable economic growth by generating new jobs in engineering, healthcare and AI.
- Market Potential: The rapidly growing global HRI market, along with the EU market for assisted living and rehabilitation, offers strong opportunities for innovative solutions like EMBRACE. The system offers an innovative, user-friendly and adaptable solution to existing clinic-based rehabilitation robotics.
- Industrial Added Value: Enhances HRI systems, leading to simplified training, reduced onboarding time and improved productivity. It also reduces errors and improves efficiency in human-robot collaboration.
- Trustworthy AI: The project follows European principles for privacy and data protection. It aims to advance AI that is fair, transparent and inclusive, safeguarding user rights while supporting ethical innovation.
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