On the Development Strategy of an Architecture for E-health Service Robots

This paper presents a service robot architecture based on the principles of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), whose modularity design maximizes the benefits of multidisciplinary contributions from researchers of different areas. The diagram of the proposed architecture is presented and discussed in terms of its development strategy, oriented towards the creation of societal and economical impact. Services are supported by an intelligently managed database, storing personal profiles and preferences towards an active and personalized assistive care. The Entity-Relationship schema is described in detail, giving an overview of how the different types of information are related, e.g., relating preferred activities with specific locations and with preferred friends to take part. It is virtually impossible to identify all elderly needs in advance, since their fragile condition leads to constantly changing needs. The proposed methodology fosters services adaptability. It allows them to continuously fit elderly specific needs efficiently and improve the quality of a service without requiring redeveloping it entirely. By applying the proposed architecture, a service robot can, for example, actively look for an elderly person to inform him about the daily lunch menu, advising him according to their food preferences, or even perform specific actions, in a personalise manner, when the elderly is found in a certain status (felling sad, bored, etc.). This work is developed within the context of the Social Robot project, funded by the FP7 Marie Curie Programme IAAP.