The intelligent butler: A virtual agent for disabled and elderly people assistance

Abstract

Social assistance constitutes an increasing problem in developed countries, which can be considered from two dimensions: the home and the hospital frameworks. Anyway, most of the tasks have to do with aiding people with limitations in complex environments as a hospital or a house. Intelligent agents constitute a powerful approach in designing computer systems making possible the interaction of the users (elderly and disabled people) with the elements of a domotics environment. Such a purpose can be achieved through the unification of artificial intelligence techniques, virtual reality, multimodal interfaces and digital nets with domotics services. This paper describes the design and implementation of the prototype for a virtual agent capable of attending disabled people in a home environment. The results are shown through a computer program that simulates the behaviour of the agent in developing some typical functions. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.