PAL Robotics joins the EU Project GrowMeUp
PAL Robotics is participating in the GrowMeUp project, a robotics healthcare investigation co-funded by the European Union under the Framework Programme Horizon 2020. Its objective is to build and test an affordable robot helpful for Ambient Assisted Living environments, to be developed in 3 years. The robot is called GrowMu: it will constantly learn from older people’s changing habits to adapt its functionalities and provide support in their daily life.
This healthcare robot will benefit elderly people with light physical or cognitional deficiencies. It will cope with their routine changes along the aging process while interacting with them. GrowMu will stand out with its behaviour and emotional understanding, intelligent dialoguing and personalized service provision. In the long term the robot will motivate the elderly to remain active, both prolonging their independence and increasing their quality of life. It will grow over time to cope with their needs and compensate the deterioration of their abilities continuously over time.
The system will provide an adaptable and intelligent dialogue component that learns from previous interactions. GrowMu will correlate dialogues with recognized emotions during the communication, enabling it to build emotional bonds with the elderly person, just like humans do. The robotics healthcare project also includes a cloud-computing technology that will allow different robots to share service information between each other to enhance their functionalities. Trials with end user partners (of two Care Centres from the Netherlands and Portugal) will be performed from an early stage, improving the investigation.
The project is carried out with other seven European companies and research organizations from five different countries. PAL Robotics is in charge of running and validating the technical integration of the whole system, altogether with the task of enabling the robot to recognize emotions analysing the user’s face. We will also be responsible of the commercial exploitation of the project results.
Considering that population in Europe will grow old in the near future, robotic support for the elderly becomes a relevant concern. GrowMeUp project wants to provide a robotics healthcare solution that will benefit our society, increasing our quality of life.
European partners involved in this robotics healthcare project
The partners of the research program are:
- University of Coimbra (Portugal)
- University of Geneva (Switzerland)
- Aatrium-Orbis: Cure and Care Centre organization (Netherlands)
- University of Cyprus (Cyprus)
- PAL Robotics (Spain)
- ProBayes (France)
- Citard IT Services (Cyprus)
- Caritas Diocesana de Coimbra: Care Centre (Portugal)
Further information can be found within our blog on robotics and also in the GrowMeUp Press Release.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme – Societal Challenge 1 (DG CONNECT/H) under grant agreement No 643647.
- ALMI
- Healthcare
