EuroAGE+

The EuroAGE+ project aims at fostering autonomous healthy life, mainly in elderly people but also in people with some degree of dependency, through the promotion of innovative initiatives based on ICT and specially socially assistive robots. The project involves Portugal-Spain cross-border cooperation of partners from EuroACE region, a region that covers Centro and Alentejo regions in Portugal, and Extremadura region in Spain, which is a territory in Iberian Peninsula heavily affected by the ageing of the population. The research team from ISR - University of Coimbra (ISR-UC) who participates in the EuroAGE+ project has been demonstrating and validating with elderly people the use of assistive robots as a key technology to promote active and healthy ageing, through cognitive, socio-emotional stimulation and physical activity promotion, thus contributing to quality of life enhancement and increased healthy life expectancy, mainly in the elderly population. In EuroAGE+, the research effort of ISR-UC is directed to the improvement of artificial perception and semantic knowledge representation of assistive robots and the development of more natural and personalized human-robot interaction in assistive robots, including the use of natural language (i.e. dialogue).