CARESSES

CARESSES is a EU H2020 collaborative project between Europe and Japan. CARESSES will design culturally aware and culturally competent elder care robots. These robots will be able to adapt how they behave and speak to the culture, customs and manners of the person they assist.

The innovative approach of CARESSES will result in care robots that are designed to be sensitive to the culture-specific needs and preferences of elderly clients, while offering them a safe, reliable and intuitive system, specifically designed to support active and healthy ageing and reduce caregiver burden.

The role of Orebro University in CARESSES is to design general technique to make robot plan and execute their actions in a way that is culturally aware and culturally competent. For instance, the way a robot handles an object to a person, the distance the robot keeps from the person, and the topics of conversation may all be determined by the cultural context.

CARESSES will run from January 1, 2017, until January 31, 2020, under the coordination of the University of Genova, Italy. The total budget of CARESSES is over 2 million EUR; the share of Orebro University is about 500,000 EUR.

More information are available at the CARESSES web site: http://www.caressesrobot.org/.