Increased life expectancy is an achievement of modern societies in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Countries (and recently in developing Countries) thanks to the technological progress in health, living places and quality of food. An aggregate consequence of the prolongation of the life-time span is the growth of an ageing society, testified by several demographic studies. The study of the consequences of an ageing society on the future of social living had recently been considered by large world institutions (WHO, UN, EU, etc), which addressed and designed programs for social and technological development taking into account the impact of the ageing society in the future of the world.
Within this framework, topics such as “prolonging independent living”, “ageing well”, active and healthy aging, or “social inclusion” are increasingly becoming more and more relevant. The incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases during ageing impose the need for innovative approaches to the assistance, including the ability of self-management, which has become an increasingly important requirement of healthcare in Europe and beyond. Being able to self-manage one’s own health requires high levels of health literacy and continuous collaboration between persons, carers and health professionals. In order for people to manage health on a long term basis, they need to be able to understand and assess health related information to make informed decisions. They need to be able to collaborate closely with health care professionals, ask the right questions and take control of their circumstances related to their health condition. Hence, innovative interventions embedded with e-health applications are extremely important to improve the Active and Health Ageing of the population and health literacy of this population.
Several initiatives all over the world took care of these aspects focusing on the problem of developing a new generation of innovative technologies to face an ageing society and its growing needs. Novel assistive solutions and technologies are indeed necessary to properly deal with the increasing demand for personalized assistance and to support users in different scenarios. Such solutions should be capable of effectively merging heterogeneous and potentially conflicting requirements coming from different stakeholders bridging the gap between health needs of users and clinical and social requirements. In this context, the increasing demand for personalized, continuous and adaptive assistance of an ageing population can be effectively addressed only through a multidisciplinary approach. The synergetic contribution of different research areas like, e.g., Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet-of-Things (IoT), Robotics and Social Science is crucial to deliver innovative and impactful results and technologies.
Workshop Topics
This event aims at attracting works on the following topics (but not limited to):
- Cognitive Robotics
- Social-Awareness in Human-Robot Interaction
- Cultural-Awareness in Human-Robot Interaction
- Personalized and Adaptive Robotic Assistance
- Activity Monitoring Systems (indoor and outdoor)
- Object and Activity Recognition
- Trustworthy Social Robots
- Explainable AI with Social Robots
- Co-Design of Assistive Solutions
- Mixed-Initiative Interaction
- Ethical Issues in Social Robotics for Ageing Society
- AI Techniques Applied to Assistive Scenarios
- Evaluation Methodologies and Experiences for Social Robots
- Multi-modal Perception