CLARC: A Cognitive Robot for Helping Geriatric Doctors in Real Scenarios

Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA) is an integrated clinical process to evaluate the frailty of elderly persons in order to create therapy plans that improve their quality of life. For robotizing these tests, we are designing and developing CLARC, a mobile robot able to help the physician to capture and manage data during the CGA procedures, mainly by autonomously conducting a set of predefined evaluation tests. Built around a shared internal representation of the outer world, the architecture is composed of software modules able to plan and generate a stream of actions, to execute actions emanated from the representation or to update this by including/removing items at different abstraction levels. Percepts, actions and intentions coming from all software modules are grounded within this unique representation. This allows the robot to react to unexpected events and to modify the course of action according to the dynamics of a scenario built around the interaction with the patient. The paper describes the architecture of the system as well as the preliminary user studies and evaluation to gather new user requirements.