REA 1323: Smart RoboCarer: Towards Next-generation Robotic Care System for the Elderly

REA 1323: Currently the size of the elderly population is dramatically increasing worldwide, e.g., there are 11 million people aged 65 or over in the UK and 120 million people aged 65 or above in China. Meanwhile, both UK and China are particularly facing shared challenges of providing skilled human carers for the elderly. The cost of having the services provided by human carers is also expected to increase annually. This requires timely actions for the research and development of innovative, effective and affordable healthcare technologies to address the growing healthcare problems and improve the quality of life for the elderly in the ageing population. Currently, very few affordable robot-based systems have been routinely deployed at home or nursing centre to help deal with the difficult challenges associated with collective care of the elderly (e.g., complex scenarios, information conflicts and robust system performance over dynamic uncertain environmental characteristics, etc). To tackle this enormous, shared social healthcare challenge being faced by the UK and other countries and address the aforementioned research gaps, the aim of this timely ambitious research is to investigate the fundamental and most challenging issues in developing the next-generation robotic care system, termed as Smart RoboCarer, to enable the collective care of the elderly in future’s digital society with the Internet of Things (IoTs) everywhere.


The research challenging issue targeted in this proposal is how the RoboCarer would be able to autonomously support independent living of the elderly both at home or nursing centre. The proposed approach in this studentship proposal is to investigate a novel intelligent system which integrates advanced cognitively-inspired Big Data AI/healthcare functions with state-of-the-art energy-efficient hardware technology in a smart robotic care system customised for the elderly people.

This project aims to improve the mobility and independent living of the elderly by carrying out fundamental research programme in the targeted domain with the focus of addressing the gaps in applying robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) to the healthcare field for widening RAS’s social and economic impact.

The research objective is to investigate affordable next-generation assistive healthcare technologies by performing a PhD-level study on the smart robotic carer for facilitating the diagnosis, monitoring, preventative care, treatment and rehabilitation of the elderly in the presence of chronic disease conditions such as mild cognitive impairment.

To achieve this objective, the proposed project will be focusing on the following three research tasks: 1) To automatically detect and intelligently recognize the hazardous situations within the residential areas of the elderly. 2) To provide reliable and accurate alarms for medical interventions and predictive risk assessments through safe and reliable networks. 3) To facilitate the self-management of the elderly by integrating different health data (multimodal information) and monitoring the trends and changes in a timely manner.

The proposed project is closely aligning with one of priorities within the EPSRC’s Prosperity Outcomes Framework, i.e., Health. The ultimate ambition of this proposed research is to deliver effective interactive solutions and services in social healthcare – underpinned by adopting novel cognitively-inspired, proactive human-robot interaction paradigm.

Applicants must be able to demonstrate enthusiasm, creativity, resourcefulness and a mature approach to learning.

Applications must be received by 30th June, 2017
For more information on the position, please e-mail [Email Address Removed]