Buddy
Be Well
Buddy Be Well
The happy empathic robot assistant for lifestyle tips to stay healthy
Buddy-BeWell
A project with purpose
As the population is ageing rapidly, it is important to find ways to assist healthy ageing. There are many these negative (mental) health effects that can be reduced with lifestyle interventions that promote an active, positive, and social life. Social robotics could be the key to deliver such interventions effectively. The evidence from recent literature reviews regarding the impact of social robotics for elderly people in relation to psychological wellbeing is encouraging. However, still a lot of progress needs to be made to develop a truly empathic robot. The goal of this project is to provide older users (and their caregivers) with a robotic companion running the latest AI technology. The robot will be delivering advice for a healthy lifestyle in a personalized way. This will help lift their spirits and make doing a healthy activity more fun. So that ultimately older people can stay healthier and stay at home longer.
Enhanced Performance
A truly empathic companion
For this project, we will turn Buddy the emotional robot into an empathic robot. In order to do this it is important that Buddy can truly understand the emotion and motivation of the user, to structure the interactions accordingly. The main result of the project will be an enhanced Buddy robot with stronger hardware and improved functionalities, embedded with FaceReader multimodal emotion and physiological assessment, monitoring health related indices and delivering just-in-time adaptive lifestyle interventions based on behavior change theory, implemented in a 24h support platform.
The market of personal robots is increasing but there currently is not a robot on the market that integrates complex emotional interactions and can really be a companion in someone’s home.