Towards a Caring Home for Assisted Living

Abstract. Ambient Assisted Living aims at developing systems that assist people in their daily tasks. In this context, assistance and care are delegated to the intelligence embedded in the environment that, in our opinion, should provide not only a task-oriented support but also an interface able to establish a social empathic relation with the user. This is what we call a “caring home”. In this paper we report our experience in designing a caring home environment that combines C@sa, a multi-agent system for managing the smart home behavior, and NICA, a conversational interface embodied in a social robot able to recognize the user attitude and to provide the appropriate social response.