2018 IEEE 23rd International Workshop on Computer Aided Modeling and Design of Communication Links and
Networks (CAMAD)
Key challenges for developing a Socially Assistive
Robotic (SAR) solution for the health sector
Keven T. Kearney, Domenico Presenza, Federica Saccà, Philip Wright
Research and Development Laboratory
Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A.
Rome, Italy
{Keven.Kearney & Domenico.Presenza & Federica.Sacca & Philip.Wright}@eng.it
Abstract — To help meet the health and caregiving needs of an
increasingly ageing population, Engineering is developing SARA,
a “Socially Assistive Robotic Solution for Ambient assisted
living”, as an extension of its commercial AREAS Enterprise
Resource Planning suite for the Health sector. SARA is a complex
distributed home automation and robotics system providing
health monitoring and (socially interactive) assistance in daily
living tasks to the elderly (and their caregivers) at home – with
the aim to prolong their autonomy and delay their
institutionalization. While advances in artificial intelligence and
internet-of-things technologies are converging to make SARA
(and similar automated solutions) ever more technically feasible
and economically viable, there nevertheless remain significant
technological challenges to overcome. This paper introduces
SARA, describes some of the key challenges faced in its
development, and explains how smart end-to-end IoT
interoperability, connectivity and security can help tackle these
challenges.
Keywords— IoT, Cloud, SAR, AAL, MIC, Alzheimer disease,
robotic, HRI
I. INTRODUCTION
The global trend for increased life expectancy [1] is
expected to be accompanied by a rapid rise in the number of
people affected by Mild Cognitive Impairment (MIC) [2] or
mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD) [3] [4]. Aging and dementia
lead to a significant chronic loss in physical/cognitive
capacities and a decline in functional ability, resulting in
increased dependency and need for caregiving [5], with
substantial medical, social, psychological, and financial
burdens placed on patients, their families, and their
communities [6]. Indeed, the kind of continuous, holistic and
integrated care required by people with dementia cannot be
satisfied by the current ‘specialist’ model [7], and the gap
between the number of people in need of care and those able
to provide it is expected to grow [8]. People also prefer to live
in their own homes for as long as possible rather than being
institutionalized in sheltered/nursery homes when age-related
problems appear [9]. Leading, for example, [10] to propose
“Aging in place” - allowing older adults to age in the least
restrictive environment of their choice - as a more desirable
and viable care model.
Home automation and robotics systems can help relieve the
caregiving burden and make ‘ageing in place’ a reality by
providing physical and cognitive assistance to the elderly in
the common tasks of daily home living, helping them maintain
978-1-5386-6151-2/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
their autonomy longer and delay the need for social/health
service interventions [11]. Advances in artificial intelligence
(AI) and IoT technologies are rapidly converging to make such
solutions both technically and economically feasible. In this
light, Engineering [12] is extending its current commercial
AREAS® suite - an Enterprise Resource Planning solution for
the Health sector - with SARA (Socially Assistive Robotic
Solution for Ambient assisted living), a robotic system aimed
at providing automated health/incident monitoring and home
assistance to elderly people with mild cognitive impairments.
This paper describes some of the key challenges entailed in the
development of SARA and highlights areas where smart end-
to-end IoT interoperability, connectivity and security –
technologies at the heart of the EU funded SEMIOTICS
project [13] - can play a critical role.
The remainder of this paper comprises the following
sections: Section II provides an overview of the system;
Section III presents an application scenario and lists some key
assistive tasks supported by SARA; Section IV describes
significant technological challenges in developing SARA; and
Section V provides a summary conclusion.
II. OVERVIEW OF THE SARA SYSTEM
As its name indicates, SARA is a Socially Assistive
Robotics (SAR) solution, which [14] define as the intersection
of Assistive Robotics (AR) - typically robots that provide
physical assistance (e.g. rehabilitation robots, wheelchair
robots, mobility aids, manipulator arms) - and Socially
Interactive Robotics (SIR) - whose main task is some form of
social interaction with humans (e.g. engaging in conversation,
understanding gestures, role taking, task collaboration). SAR
aims to assist humans through social interaction – an ambitious
goal given that social interaction is arguably the most complex
of all human behaviours. A socially competent robot, for
example, according to [15], should be able to: communicate
with high-level dialog; use natural cues (gaze, gesture, etc.);
express and/or perceive emotions; learn/recognise models of
other agents; exhibit distinctive personality and character;
establish and maintain social relationships; (possibly)
learn/develop social competences.
Achieving human level competence in these areas is well
beyond even the best of contemporary AI technologies, so
with SARA our goal is more pragmatic. We aim to develop an
expandable platform that initially exhibits only trivial social
capabilities (well within current technological limits), while
 2018 IEEE 23rd International Workshop on Computer Aided Modeling and Design of Communication Links and
Networks (CAMAD)
yet providing a solid foundation for future expansion to more
sophisticated human-like interactions.
In line with previous work on ‘intelligent environments’
suited to the elderly [11][16], the design of SARA integrates a
number of assistive technologies to address the diverse
problems that older people face when living independently
with the support of their community. More specifically, it
comprises multiple mobile (mobotic) and static (domotic, or
home automation) robotic elements working in tandem with
wearable health monitors, personal smart devices (phones and
tablets) and various (proprietary and third party)
computational and information services, to continuously
monitor and assist elderly subjects (and their caregivers) in
their normal daily activities in and around the home. The
technical components of SARA are as follows:
• backend AREAS Cloud Services (ACS): serving
primarily as a repository of medical records and an
offline store for monitored bio-medical data;
• a Body Area Network (BAN) comprising wearable
health monitors (e.g. for heart-rate, blood pressure,
breathing rate, stress levels, balance and fall detection)
worn by the elderly subject and communicating via
Bluetooth to their personal device (phone or tablet);
• a Robotic Rollator (RR): a smart wheeled walking
frame providing physical support for standing, sitting
and walking, and capable of monitoring its user’s
posture and gait, and of (limited) autonomous
navigation;
• a Robotic Assistant (RA): a mobile humanoid robot -
specifically Softbank’s humanoid “Pepper” robot [17] -
capable of autonomous navigation, face recognition,
scripted dialog and adopting life-like human poses (e.g.
to perform arm/hand gestures);
• various AI Services: computational resources
providing machine learning (ML), mapping, route
planning and reasoning capabilities (among others);
• a Smart Home: a home incorporating intelligent
objects, utilizing wired or wireless networks and having
the capacity to analyse patterns of activities to manage
appliances in anticipation of human needs or to provide
adaptive cues for human occupants.
Fig. 1 SARA communication system
With the exception of the ACS and RR (both developed in
house by Engineering) these components are all off-the-shelf
devices that are not specifically designed to work together.
The different devices consume and produce different kinds and
quantities of data, in diverse formats, and support different
modes of network communication (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, wired
ethernet, can-bus, etc.). Moreover: for reliability, critical data
is collated from multiple redundant sources (several
components monitoring the same features) and shared through
multiple redundant channels; to ensure timely responses of
robotic elements, AI intense computations (described in
Section IV below) are executed concurrently throughout the
system, with operations dynamically dispatched to the nearest
available computing resources (including edge devices);
network configurations are not static: mobile devices move
around and may temporarily go out of range of Wi-Fi; mains
powered devices (e.g. Wi-Fi base stations, domotic servers)
are lost during power outages, while battery powered devices
(e.g. robots and phones) will need periodic recharging; and
wearable health monitors (BAN devices) can be removed (e.g.
when taking a bath).
In short, solely in terms of hardware, software, network
structure and network communications, SARA is a highly
heterogeneous and dynamic distributed system, which of itself
raises a number of significant technical challenges (described
further in Section IV). Additional challenges derive from the
application scenario, which is described in the next section.
III. APPLICATION SCENARIO: ASSISTING THE ELDERLY AT
HOME
As already stated, SARA is a robotic solution aimed at
providing automated health/incident monitoring and home
assistance to elderly people with mild cognitive impairments.
The solution is intended to be provided ‘as a service’, under
controlled supervision, by local health authorities, to eligible
citizens. The following narrative (a hypothetical case study)
illustrates some of the ways SARA could impact the daily lives
of the elderly and their caregivers.
Piero is 70 years old and lives in a ‘smart’ apartment in
Rome with his daughter who looks after his daily needs. Piero
suffers mild Alzheimer’s disease and has problems walking
due to a recent hip replacement. As such, his General
Practitioner (GP) has registered him as eligible for SARA,
and the necessary technical components – Robotic Assistant
(RA), Robotic Rollator (RR) and wearable Body Area Network
(BAN) health monitors - have been delivered and configured
to his specific needs. His ‘smart’ apartment was already fitted
with various domotic (home automation) devices - including a
smart armchair and smart medicine box - all now integrated
into the SARA system.
One afternoon, while his daughter is out at the
supermarket, Piero sits dozing in front of the television -
which he has been watching for some time. The SARA system
notices this and (following ‘daily activity’ rules configured by
Piero’s GP) decides that Piero should instead perform one of
his prescribed cognitive rehabilitation exercises. Accordingly,
the RA approaches Piero, calls him by name a few times to get
 2018 IEEE 23rd International Workshop on Computer Aided Modeling and Design of Communication Links and
Networks (CAMAD)
his attention, and suggests the exercise. Piero agrees, and
they begin. For this particular exercise, the RA displays a
sequence of pictures and symbols (on its chest-mounted tablet)
which Piero has to correctly (verbally) identify.
With the exercise done, the RA reminds Piero that it is time
for him to take his medicine. Piero looks around but can’t find
his tablets. He asks the RA where they are, and the RA informs
him that his ‘smart’ medicine box is in the kitchen. Piero asks
the RA to call the rollator (RR), which wakes, and
autonomously steers itself from its rest position in the corner
of the room to Piero. Using the RR for support, Piero stands,
and walks to the kitchen - all the while being escorted and
monitored by the RA.
On the way, however, Piero feels faint and staggers. His
BAN health monitors detect the loss of balance and reduction
in blood pressure, the RR notices a change in his gait and
increased pressure on the handles, while the RA sees his
expression change to a grimace. All of which is sufficient to
raise an alert.
The SARA system duly notifies Piero’s daughter (as his
assigned caregiver) of the situation. His daughter receives the
alert on her mobile phone, and initiates a telepresence session
- a live two-way audio/visual stream from her phone to the
RA’s built-in chest tablet – to assess the situation (avoiding
any need for her father to locate and answer his phone). His
daughter quickly ascertains that Piero is not in any immediate
trouble, but she tells him that she’ll be home soon, and just to
make sure everything is ok, also sends a request (through
SARA) for a remote medical check.
After the call, and feeling somewhat better, Piero
continues to the kitchen. The smart apartment automatically
turns off the lights in the lounge, and turns on those in the
kitchen. The RA visually detects, and informs Piero, that his
smart medicine box is over by the sink. Piero sits down at the
kitchen table and takes his pills, while the RR autonomously
parks itself in the corner of the room out of the way.
A short while later his daughter arrives home and, having
received notification that a medic is available and waiting,
initiates a new telepresence session between the RA and the
medic - who has already accessed Piero’s medical records
and recent BAN data. After walking Piero and his daughter
through a few physical checks (e.g. taking his blood pressure),
the medic asks Piero’s daughter to hook up a heart and
breathing monitor to the BAN and then remotely monitors the
readings as Piero performs some simple RA-guided physical
exercises. In this case, the RA performs a series of pre-
orchestrated movements, which Piero has to copy as best he
can (with the RA giving performance feedback). The exam is
soon over, with the medic confirming that all seems ok.
As evidenced in the narrative, the assistive roles played by
SARA include (among other things): Keeping track of the
location of significant objects (e.g. Piero’s medicine box);
Escorting and providing mobility support for the elderly as
they move through their environment; Monitoring a subject’s
health conditions (e.g. the BAN detects a Piero’s loss of
balance, the RR detects a change in his gate, and the RA
detects a change in his facial expression); Notifying assigned
caregivers of possible problems and incidents (e.g. SARA
alerts Piero’s daughter when Piero shows signs of distress);
Enabling doctors/caregivers and family members to remotely
check in on a patient (e.g. on request, SARA initiates a remote
audio/video link); Performing cognitive and physical
rehabilitation exercises; Reminding patients to take prescribed
medication at allotted times; Access to and persistent storage
of detailed monitored health data (e.g. SARA maintains an
offline record of the historical data collected by the BAN,
which in the narrative is later accessed by the medic, but can
also be used for general analytical/research purposes).
This application scenario makes apparent the intimate and
critical role that SARA plays in the life of the elderly. The
system is embedded in the home and is an intimate part of an
elderly person’s daily life, with continuous access to highly
personal and sensitive data about their ongoing activities and
state of health. This naturally raises strong security and
privacy concerns, which SARA must address. The role of the
SARA system is also health-critical: it matters if the system
fails to detect a health-related incident, or to remind a patient
to take their medicine. So SARA must also be robust and
dependable, which raises further technical challenges -
especially in light of the system’s heterogeneous, dynamic and
distributed nature (Section III). Finally, as for any machinery
deployed in the home, and even more so in the homes of the
elderly, SARA must be safe.
In sum, even if we limit SARA (for now) to displaying
only trivial social capabilities (Section II), it should be clear
that there are nevertheless significant foundational technical
challenges. We review these challenges in more detail in the
next section.
IV. TECHNICAL CHALLENGES
This section describes key technical challenges in the
design and development of SARA, with particular emphasis on
those aspects where SEMIOTICS innovations in smart end-to-
end IoT interoperability, connectivity and security can play a
key role in providing a solution.
A. Challenges in Security, Privacy, Dependability and Safety
In section III (above) we highlighted a strong need for
addressing security, privacy, dependability and safety
concerns. This cannot be overstated. SARA, to re-iterate, is a
technology aimed at a specific sector of the health domain. It
is intended to provide real benefits to elderly citizens and their
caregivers and to relieve pressure on overstrained health and
social services. This overarching goal should not be
compromised by the technology itself. In particular, the system
must be secure from malicious intrusion, must respect a
citizen’s privacy – especially w.r.t. the exchange and storage
of sensitive health-related data - and must (to be of actual
benefit) reliably and safely perform its function.
Key security, privacy, dependability and safety
requirements for SARA include the following: all stored
personal data (e.g. medical records, monitored BAN data)
must be securely encrypted with protected access only by
 2018 IEEE 23rd International Workshop on Computer Aided Modeling and Design of Communication Links and
Networks (CAMAD)
authorized and authenticated individuals and/or system
processes; all communications with personal data as content
must be securely encrypted with authenticated endpoints – this
also extends to notifications (e.g. incident alerts and
reminders) and the audio/video streams transmitted during
telepresence sessions; the treatment of patient health data
must comply with healthcare domain standards (e.g. [18]) and
national and international regulations concerning security and
privacy (e.g. [19]); all actuator control signals (whether
originating ‘on device’ or ‘over the network’) must be
protected from malicious interference – e.g. we do not want
hackers taking remote control of the RA or RR; system
components and technologies must be configured on a reliable
network to avoid service interruptions; high-priority
communications, e.g. incident alerts, must be transmitted by
reliable means (e.g. multiple identical transmissions over
multiple channels) and given network priority; the SARA
system (in particular, its robotic components) must include
failsafe measures to ensure that no harm can come to the
Patient (or anyone else); system components and
communications technologies must not interfere with or
disrupt medical equipment (and reciprocally, for reliability,
should not be negatively affected by medical equipment).
As described in Section II, SARA is complex
heterogeneous and dynamic distributed system comprising
many diverse components, both fixed and mobile, connected
to both local and global networks, and communicating in many
ways. Ensuring end-to-end security, privacy, dependability and
safety for such a complex system is a major challenge. In a
nutshell, we need a means to accurately assess the impact of
varying system configurations on the security, privacy,
dependability and safety properties of the system: to verifiably
ascertain, for example, if using a particular device for a
particular purpose, or a particular configuration of devices,
exposes the system to an unacceptable level of risk.
SEMIOTICS offers a viable, albeit partial, solution to this
challenge in the form of “SPDI patterns” which model
dependencies between security, privacy, dependability and
interoperability (SPDI) properties of smart objects and the
corresponding properties of orchestrations/compositions built
over these objects. Based on such patterns, the system can then
formally verify whether or not a given device configuration
satisfies some set of SPDI properties. It can also, in principle,
generate (or adapt) device configurations guaranteed to satisfy
SPDI properties – which has further implications for network
management (discussed in Section IV.D below).
The degree to which SPDI patterns can in practice resolve
the particular security, privacy, dependability and safety
challenges of SARA remains to be determined. Ostensibly, for
example, SPDI patterns do not explicitly cover safety
requirements. We can, however, identify a strong need for an
IoT infrastructure that supports the kind of formal, verifiable
end-to-end security, privacy, dependability analytics that SPDI
offers.
B. Challenges in Interoperability
In addition to the interoperability mechanisms required for
SPDI (previous section), the SARA system also raises
interoperability challenges of a more traditional nature.
As described in Section II, the SARA system relies on a
distributed network of sensors and actuators, employing
diverse wired and wireless communications technologies. The
nodes in the network are highly heterogenous, ranging from
basic inertial measurement units (IMU - e.g. for balance and
fall detection), presence sensors (e.g. cameras equipped with
motion detection and face/object recognition), to sophisticated
robotic devices with their own internal sensor/actuator systems
and onboard computers. The sensor/actuator network also
communicates with backend cloud services to access and store
events (e.g. ‘fall detected’, ‘telepresence session initiated’) and
monitored health data (e.g. detailed time-sequenced
measurements from BAN devices).
Accordingly, the system must deal with a wide range of
device semantics (different kinds of devices with different
functions), data formats (syntactic representations),
measurement unit conventions (for sensor readings), and
communications protocols (e.g. wifi, zigbee, bluetooth – see
Fig.1). Various key aspects of SARA functionality, moreover,
require that data from multiple sources is collated, aggregated
and/or analyzed in a coherent collective fashion. The reliable
detection of ‘fall incidents’, for example, may involve the
continuous comparative evaluation of data from wearable IMU
devices, RR handle-mounted pressure sensors and wall-
mounted video cameras (among others). In short, SARA must
tackle the problem of IoT device and data interoperability.
These interoperability issues impact all points in the life-
cycle of the SARA system, with sound and efficient
mechanisms for syntactic and semantic interoperability
required at: design-time: to handle heterogeneous
communication and application protocols brought into the
system by off-the-shelf actuators/sensors and other devices,
including differences at the IoT platform level - e.g. between
standard robotics platforms (such as ROS [20]) and
proprietary home automation systems; deploy-time: to map
high-level, patient-specific system requirements/configurations
as defined by medics (e.g. “the patient requires a heart monitor
with certain properties”), to specific proprietary devices -
including new and perhaps special-need devices, unforeseen at
design-time, that have to be individually procured and
integrated within the system; run-time: to enable the
opportunistic integration of third-party services (e.g. on
demand computing and AI services) and IoT elements (e.g. an
on-site paramedic, called to an incident, may need to
temporarily hook specialized medical equipment into the
system to transmit data to an offsite ‘telepresent’ medic).
As a particular example, interoperability mechanisms
(comprising semantic annotation schemes and their associated
validation technologies) could be used to i) model the
semantics/capabilities of devices on board an RR, ii) describe
requirements for a patient-specific health monitoring
application (e.g. for gait analysis) using a standardized
semantic format - which would then iii) enable the deployment
 2018 IEEE 23rd International Workshop on Computer Aided Modeling and Design of Communication Links and
Networks (CAMAD)
of a new gait analysis functionality into an RR instance that
was not initially engineered for that purpose - thanks to the
ability to automatically match the semantic descriptions of on-
board devices against the patient-specific requirements.
All in all, achieving a smooth functional integration of the
wide diversity of components and component interactions in
SARA demands a high-level of syntactic and semantic
interoperability.
C. Challenges in Artificial Intelligence
SARA is an application of Socially Assistive Robotics
(SAR), and is thus fundamentally an artificial intelligence
system. Achieving human-level social skills, as noted at the
outset, is beyond current AI capabilities. But we can still hope
to effect some primitive social capabilities and go a fair way to
constructing a solid foundation for higher-level skills. In
particular, recent advances in machine learning (ML) and the
growing availability of large data sets for training ML systems
allow us to tackle some key problems of perceptual
classification.
ML solutions for object, people/face and speech
recognition, for example, are readily available (and are
incorporated into most modern mobile devices). Technologies
for recognizing human emotions (e.g. the Eyeris [21]) and
hand gestures (e.g. the uSens FINGO [22]) are beginning to
appear on the market, and even older products like Microsoft’s
Kinect [23] can provide coarse grained gesture/posture
recognition [24]. The massive quantity of textual material on
the web has also driven ML-based advances in natural
language processing (NLP) [245- as evidenced by Google
Assistant [26], Apple’s Siri [27] and IBM’s Watson [28], all
of which combine NLP with domain knowledge/expertise to
provide semantically relevant answers to users’ natural
language questions. State of the art NLP-knowledge systems
are progressing (tentatively) towards more fully fledged
‘conversational agents’ [29], capable (at present only to a
degree) of sustained themed dialog. There are even
conversational agents with distinct ‘personas’ [30], aiming to
deliver a yet more naturalistic conversational experience.
For sophisticated social interactions, we will eventually
need to integrate all these approaches to simultaneously and
rapidly recognize objects and people, spoken and gestural
natural language, posture and gait, to enrich these perceptual
classifications with background domain knowledge, and to
then orchestrate the whole with conversation and dialog
management. This is a heavy computational load operating
under strong time constraints.
ML is also a key technology for autonomous navigation.
Google’s Waymo [31] and Apple’s [32] driverless car
technologies, for example, critically depend on deep learning
algorithms operating over 3D point cloud data from Light
Detection and Ranging (Lidar) sensors to distinguish paths and
obstacles, and to identify and track objects (e.g. other vehicles)
and people. Recently, both Google and Apple have also
released augmented reality APIs for mobile devices that
include ML functions for identifying and tracking
horizontal/vertical surfaces and objects within video streams.
These APIs, and other ML techniques suitable for mobile
phones (e.g. [33]) can be readily applied for simultaneous
localization and mapping (SLAM [34]): the computational
problem of mapping and tracking an agent’s location within an
unknown environment. Moving from perceptual to behavior
(action) generation systems, neural networks have long been
applied for controlling the motors of wheeled robots (e.g. [35]
for a fairly recent example), and more recently also for the
simulation of more complex rigid body dynamics, such as the
coordinated movements required for the walking, trotting and
running gaits of the DARPA/Boston Dynamics ‘little dog’
quadruped robot [36]. Unsupervised networks based on
Prediction Error Minimization (PEM) [37] principles (e.g.
descendants of the Helmholtz machine [38]) also look
promising (in the not-too-distant future) for the development
of complex perception-action systems. Once again, however,
these perception and action tasks are all computationally
intensive with strong time constraints.
As stated at the outset, social interaction is arguably the
most complex of all human behaviors, and the autonomous
robotics community as a whole is still a long way from
achieving human level social competence. Contemporary ML
techniques - as indicated by the brief survey above - have
made significant steps toward this goal, primarily in the area of
perception: delivering the kinds of sensory input over which
sophisticated social behaviors could in future be constructed.
Indeed, advances in neural network technologies (such as
PEM) also look poised to tackle these wider behavioral
aspects of AI. The key point here, however, is just that SARA
will minimally require the continuous operation of a range of
perceptual systems. This means multiple AI/ML processes
working concurrently to extract different features from the
sensory input in a timely fashion - i.e. without any significant
network latency. We can thus identify a strong need for an IoT
infrastructure that supports computationally intensive,
distributed AI processing at the edge of the IoT network.
D. Challenges in Network Management
SARA is a distributed application where different
computing entities continuously communicate and synchronize
their activities to collectively generate the overall functionality
of the system. Factors underlying the need for distributed
computation in SARA include: the lack of adequate
computational resources at edge nodes to execute the heavy
computational tasks indicated in the previous section (e.g.
object/people recognition and autonomous navigation); the
need to reduce the energy consumption of mobile edge nodes
(e.g. RR, RA) by reducing the number of computations they
execute; the need to share knowledge (e.g. events detected by
home automation devices, that then need to be acted on by
robotic devices), or to access knowledge shared through the
cloud (i.e. remote data sources); the need for redundancy in
various aspects of system operation to meet requirements of
dependability and safety.
At the same time, many of these distributed computations,
due to their near real-time nature, are subject to strong time
constraints – which can only be met by a network
 2018 IEEE 23rd International Workshop on Computer Aided Modeling and Design of Communication Links and
Networks (CAMAD)
infrastructure capable of guaranteeing low latency, reliable
communications between all participating components.
The SARA robotic nodes, moreover, have
(quasi)autonomous behaviors driven to a large extent by
uncertain and unpredictable events in the environment – with a
corresponding uncertainty and unpredictability in the
generated computational load. Such variability prohibits the
advance determination of optimal configurations of
networking resources. Indeed, dealing with such dynamic run-
time variability entails adopting correspondingly dynamic and
flexible mechanisms for network management. This is
precisely the kind of flexibility offered by Software Defined
Network (SDN) [39] technologies, for example, which make it
possible to dynamically configure, via software, both proper
network data paths and alternative communication interfaces
as a function of the current status of the network and the
Quality-of-Service (QoS) demands of the application. We thus
identify a strong need in SARA for flexible, adaptive network
management solutions such as SDN.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper we have described SARA, a Socially
Assistive Robotics (SAR) solution, currently under
development, that is aimed at providing automated
health/incident monitoring and home assistance to elderly
people with mild cognitive impairments. We have outlined the
technical components of SARA and illustrated its intended
application: in particular noting its highly heterogeneous,
dynamic and distributed nature and complex functional and
behavioral repertoire. Although recent advances in AI and IoT
(coupled with the decreasing costs of hardware and large
availability of cloud computing resources) are converging to
make SAR solutions increasing technically and economically
feasible, their development still faces significant technological
challenges. In particular, we have identified four key
challenges in SARA for which smart end-to-end IoT
interoperability, connectivity and security – innovative
technologies addressed by SEMIOTICS – could prove
invaluable. The challenges are: i) strong security, privacy,
dependability and safety requirements, to which SDPI patterns
offer a partial solution, ii) device and data interoperability,
addressed by semantic transformation mechanisms, iii)
challenges in artificial intelligence, highlighting a need for
dedicated ML processes at the edge of the IoT network, and
iv) challenges in network management, where we identified a
requirement for flexible, adaptive network management
solutions, such as SDN.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the
project “SemIoTics”, under grant 780315, Horizon 2020
programme. Project full title: Smart End-to-end Massive IoT
Interoperability, Connectivity and Security.
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