SA³M: An interactive robot to provide support for the elderly

© 2014 IEEE. The number of the elderly worldwide has risen to 600 million in recent years, however, not all of them have the opportunity to receive adequate care. This situation is more critical in developing countries, where the access to autonomous-support systems for the elderly is either too expensive or not yet available. Given the above, this paper presents the design and development process of SA3M (Autonomous Support System for the elderly, from the Spanish, Sistema Autónomo de Apoyo al Adulto Mayor), an interactive robot to provide support for the elderly, and people suffering from physical impairments. This robot implements a novel approach that uses a fuzzy logic based control system, facial recognition and automatic speech recognition. Given that the robot is designed using open source software and hardware, making the cost of SA3M very affordable. Finally, the initial experiments conducted to test the accuracy in facial recognition and automatic speech recognition are presented in this paper, which produced promising results.