Sep 20 2010
Adaptable Ambient Living Assistant (ALIAS) program is expected to be launched by a collaboration of five private enterprises, three academic institutes and an end-user organization pertaining to Germany, Austria, France and Luxembourg.
The focus of this project is to develop mobile robots with cognitive attributes which can offer effective assistance to the elderly people, eliminating their loneliness. The robot was showcased at the AAL European Forum, which was held in Denmark from September 15-17.
The European Ambient Assisted Living–AAL Joint Programme has awarded 3.87million for ALIAS. This project is headed by Frank Wallhoff, a Senior Project Coordinator at the Institute for Human-Machine Communication at Technische Universitaet Muenchen and is likely to be completed within three years.
The current attributes incorporated into the robot include active interaction instigation with speech identification, assisting the elderly people in making video calls, inter-lingual internet conversation and in speech synthesis for reading newspapers. It was reported that in future, opportunities for remote inspecting of health will be realized. Touch screen computers with big and easy keyboards will be developed for helping the aged persons. In order to confirm if the robots can cope with all requirements of the aged persons, various elderly people will be allowed to review the robots.
At the TUM University, the project will be assigned to Cognition for Technical Systems (CoTeSys) Cluster of Excellence, with assistance from DFG, a German research foundation. Associated Projects will work on the research output of Cluster and will promote further research on unexplored concepts rising from the definite purposes of the cognitive technological systems.
Source: http://portal.mytum.de