1. General
Category
SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being
Category
HMOs & Health Care Services
2. Project Details
Company or Institution
Yasyt Robotics SL & Andorra Research + Innovation Foundation (joint venture)
Project
RobHome senior care home assistant
General description of the AI solution
RobHome is a system based on intelligent commercial voice devices with Natural Language Processors (currently Amazon’s Alexa devices) tailored to improve the quality of life of the elderly who live in their own homes.
RobHome offers various skills in order to guarantee the conditions of health, entertainment, medical support , communication and response to exceptional situations such as Covid19, dementia and other health conditions.
Likewise, RobHome aims to be a tool with high added value, both for close family members and for caregivers at home.
Health module
Services that enhance people's health habits, facilitate adherence to medication and its correct administration, monitor their well-being status and allow health professionals to be approached online.
Entertainment module
Services to fill the empty hours with different types of activities aimed at responding to the problems of loneliness or disorientation, stimulating the user to delay physical and cognitive deterioration, facilitating relaxation or spirituality activities, and offering useful training and information, both for the user as well as their caregivers.
Communication Module
Services to ensure the connection of people with the outer world, as well as the participation of those around them, through the establishment of video calls, the creation of communities or the establishment of multimedia galleries for the life history of each user.
Exception Module
Services to establish adequate contingency procedures and to improve the resiliency of certain sectors of society.
Security module, (currently under development)
Services to guarantee the safety of people at their homes:
• Personal security. Its mission is to detect risk or alarm situations related to people's own situation and initiate the appropriate action protocols for each situation.
• Home security. Its mission is to detect situations of misuse or incidents in various home equipment and initiate the appropriate action protocols for each situation.
Website
Organisation
Yasyt Robotics, SL
3. Aspects
Excellence and Scientific Quality: Please detail the improvements made by the nominee or the nominees’ team or yourself if your applying for the award, and why they have been a success.
This project it is being tested, implemented, and iterated using a ready-to-market commercial NLP, currently Amazon’s Alexa.
Four key aspects of Robhome are:
1. Intuitive Proactive Interaction
The user communicates with the system by voice.
The system is proactive, and it is continuously attentive to any order expressed by the user; from time to time, it acts autonomously for reminders or to capture incidents and alarm situations.
The voice interface is reinforced with other systems that enhance the global proactivity.
Communication is intuitive since the user does not have to carry out any operation; she simply requests or declares what she needs.
2. Component Integration Platform
Currently in development, RobHome will integrate various types of components that will make possible to have smart features.
• Detection sensors.
• Voice Devices.
• Actuators.
• Home IoT devices.
• Medical equipment.
• Wearables.
3. AI
The system is supported by various AI algorithms designed to respond to user needs, establishing a “Long Term Relationship” criterion that allow the services offered to be customized as much as possible:
• Security levels.
• Alarm management.
• Medication plan.
• Cognitive stimulation plan.
• Schedule.
• Data management.
4. Big Data
The development of functionalities and services of RobHome generates a significant volume of data that is anonymously managed with two purposes:
• Trends and user behavior studies to allow the optimization of supervision and planning tasks focused on an increasingly better service.
• Information correlation from users to establish trends and evolution analysis oriented to the obtention of global conclusions that would be applicable to the entire society.
Yasyt Robotics closely works with caring professionals to understand how the use of technology can help them in the caring tasks of senior people and includes several research related to their physical behavior, emotional status and, also, the caregivers needs.
The next phase of this proposal is the implementation in Andorra.
Scaling of impact to SDGs: Please detail how many citizens/communities and/or researchers/businesses this has had or can have a positive impact on, including particular groups where applicable and to what extent.
The SDG nr.3, where this project is directly addressed, states “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages” and this is the main aim of the proposal.
Even though it is focused into the well-being of senior people, a community that is rapidly growing, it is additionally oriented to the caregivers and their well-being, helping out this group of people not only to have a better impact in delivering these caring services but, furthermore, to carry out the responsibility of doing so in a way that can have a positive impact in their own lives too.
The project includes two sets of indicators that can help to measure the progress of target 3.8:
• Well-being of senior people and caregivers:
• Emotional status and evolution.
• Cognitive level and evolution, classified by different mental characteristics such as memory, attention, calculation, language, decision making, etc.
• Degree of understanding of training videos.
• Level of use and interaction with the system.
• Preferences and most used modules.
• Ethical implications, from the point of view of the subjective feeling of respect for the ethical principles that the user perceives.
• No discrimination for any reason.
• Ease of use for people unfamiliar with technology.
• Privacy and data protection.
• Human dignity related to the elderly.
The use of a commercial device that is widely available ensures that a global impact can be attained by adapting a technology that it is quickly being used by households and assisting contexts; the device, with its APIs and “skill modules”, can be rapidly deployed in several environments to fulfill care services that, otherwise, will be difficult to offer if a specific AI system was to be implemented from scratch.
Likewise, the development of new AI functionalities based on voice assistants can support the progress of accomplishing SDGs.
Scaling of AI solution: Please detail what proof of concept or implementations can you show now in terms of its efficacy and how the solution can be scaled to provide a global impact ad how realistic that scaling is.
Initially, in June 2020, a project called RobRoom was developed to incorporate intelligent voice assistants in hospital rooms with two main objectives: to improve the life quality of people admitted to the hospital and to facilitate the work of the health personnel.
Subsequently, the possibility of extending the project to people living in their homes or dependent elderly people living in their homes was considered. This is how the RobHome project was born.
We conducted several focus groups with physicians, nurses, professional caregivers, family caregivers, and social workers.
In parallel, we have carried out work to detect the needs of primary caregivers by simulating with 5 real caregivers.
Two simulations were performed to detect needs.
• Daily home care situations
• Unforeseen in-home care
All the information obtained has been the conceptual basis of the project.
Currently, Robroom is implemented, as a pilot test, in 10 homes in the city of Barcelona and 10 homes in the municipal environment of Olot, in the province of Girona (Spain).
The implementation of the various RobRoom modules is done progressively in order to ensure acceptance and learning by its users.
A scorecard has been designed that will allow monthly monitoring of the results from the end of this year.
The main aspects that we want to evaluate in a first phase of control of results are:
• The acceptance of the system.
• The level of use.
• User satisfaction.
• The limits of the use of this technology.
Currently, YASYT Robotics in collaboration with the Suara Cooperative, has just received a Spanish fund to continue working on this project and to introduce all the IoT features that will allow RobHome to expand, mainly in its security functionalities.
Ethical aspect: Please detail the way the solution addresses any of the main ethical aspects, including trustworthiness, bias, gender issues, etc.
The ethical aspect is one of the main topics that the project is currently focus on.
The fact that this technology can help people that are vulnerable, and the collection and use of critical sensitive data that is being made implies that the ethical approach should be taken from the very beginning of the project.
Not only the qualities of the regulation of data privacy should be considered, but also the ethical aspects of the entire lifecycle of the system and the focus on the user and the caregiver.
The questions to be assessed are related to how the user emotionally perceives the use of these “new AI tools”, if she is diligently and rightly informed, if her data and the conclusions conveyed by it are appropriately managed (going further to the GDPR specifics that are strictly followed in this project), if she does feel at ease with the use of the several modules, and if they are tailored taking into account moral and ethical implications.
It is worth noting that this project is a joint-venture of Yasyt Robotics and Andorra Research + Innovation with the collaboration of SAAS (Servei Andorrà d’Atenció Sanitaria; the Andorran Health System). Andorra Research + Innovation is a Foundation that has a direct representation at Unesco’s Recommendation on Ethics of AI and at Council of Europe’s Ad-Hoc Committee on AI, and it aims to demonstrate how regulation and recommendations on AI can be implemented and measured in real projects.
So far, a RobHome project report has been presented to the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia.
This report included:
• The impact evaluation of the project
• User manuals for users
• Informed consent to be part of the study
After reviewing the report, the Ethics Committee gave a positive opinion.