As people age, they are more likely to develop multiple chronic diseases and experience a decline in some of their physical and cognitive functions, leading to the decrease in their ability to live independently. Innovative technology-based interventions tailored to older adults’ functional levels and focused on healthy lifestyles are considered imperative. This work proposed a framework of active and healthy ageing through the integration of a broad spectrum of digital solutions into an open Pan-European technological platform in the context of the SHAPES project, an EU-funded innovation action. In conclusion, the SHAPES project can potentially engage older adults in a holistic technological ecosystem and, therefore, facilitate the maintenance of a high-quality standard of life.

This tutorial aims at providing an up-to-date picture of the state-of-art regarding using the Robot Operating System (ROS) to build robots with socio-cognitive capabilities. The tutorial will briefly introduce the ROS4HRI framework, and show how it can be used to build a complete social robot architecture, from human perception to expressive social interaction. We will illustrate the full software integration required to implement an autonomous social robot using a combination of open-source ROS-based social perception modules, a semantic knowledge base, a Large Language Model (LLM), and multi-modal expressiveness. Participants will be able to follow along using a simple social interaction simulator, as well as their own webcams. The organisers will also provide a new PAL Robotics TIAGo Pro stand-alone head to demonstrate the same system running on actual hardware.

Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) are being developed to fulfil a range of roles that support humans. As the complexity and capability of SARs increase, they will be expected to adopt higher degrees of responsibility and execute greater levels of autonomous decision-making. Therefore, it is imperative that the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and more widely the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community seriously consider how SARs communicate about their role and the motivations and intentions behind their decisions. The proposed workshop will address challenges with respect to SAR decision-making, discuss current approaches to these challenges, and develop ideas and strategies for how the wider CHI community should move forward in this area.