Home assistance and medical monitoring

Jean-Pierre Merlet is Director of Research at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis. He heads the COPRIN project, which focuses on personal assistance and uncertainty management in robotics. His interests focus on the development of low-cost, communicating, low-intrusive service objects for homecare, which can also serve as diagnostic tools for the medical community. He is a member of the steering committee of the EURON European robotics network, the scientific council of the GDR robotics and the Executive Council of IFToMM (Int. Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Machine Science) Home assistance and medical monitoring: The convergence between the global aging of the population and the democratization of robotic systems leads us to believe that it is possible and necessary to develop accessible home assistance solutions for frail people, enabling them to preserve their autonomy and dignity, while relieving the workload of caregivers, who will then be able to focus on the relational aspect, an essential element of well-being. But the concept can be taken a step further: slight adaptations to these everyday objects can provide invaluable day-to-day information on the evolution of a person's state of health, perhaps even enabling the detection of emerging pathologies even before the patient feels their first effects. We will present the methodological rules that have helped identify needs, as well as the basic paradigms for designing these services, which have been used within the framework of the PAL Scope Action, dedicated to autonomy at home, to initiate the development of these services, some of which will be presented.