The video describes the novel concept of “culturally competent robotics”, which is the main focus of the project CARESSES (Culturally-Aware Robots and Environmental Sensor Systems for Elderly Support). CARESSES a multidisciplinary project whose goal is to design the first socially assistive robots that can adapt to the culture of the older people they are taking care of. Socially assistive robots are required to help the users in many ways including reminding them to take their medication, encouraging them to keep active, helping them keep in touch with family and friends. The video describes a new generation of robots that will perform their actions with attention to the older person's customs, cultural practices and individual preferences.

The article focusses on the work performed in preparation for an experimental trial aimed at evaluating the impact of a culturally competent robot for care home assistance. Indeed, it has been estabilished that the user's cultural identity plays an important role during the interaction with a robotic system and cultural competence may be one of the key elements for increasing capabilities of socially assistive robots. Specifically, the paper describes part of the work carried out for the definition and implementation of two different robotic systems for the care of older adults: a culturally competent robot, that shows its awareness of the user's cultural identity, and a reference robot, non culturally competent, but with the same functionalities of the former. The design of both robots is here described in detail, together with the key elements that make a socially assistive robot culturally competent, which should be absent in the non-culturally competent counterpart. Examples of the experimental phase of the CARESSES project, with a fictional user are reported, giving a hint of the validness of the proposed approach.

Research focusing on the development of socially assistive robots (SARs) for the care of older adults has grown in recent years, prompting a great deal of ethical analysis and reflection on the future of SARs in caring roles. Much of this ethical thinking, however, has taken place far from the settings where technological innovation is practiced. Different frameworks have been proposed to bridge this gap and enable researchers to handle the ethical dimension of technology from within the design and development process, including Value Sensitive Design (VSD). VSD has been defined as a “theoretically grounded approach to the design of technology that accounts for human values in a principled and comprehensive manner throughout the design process”. Inspired in part by VSD, we have developed a process geared towards embedding ethics at the core of CARESSES, an international multidisciplinary project that aims to design the first culturally competent SAR for the care of older adults. Here we describe that process, which included extracting key ethical concepts from relevant ethical guidelines and applying those concepts to scenarios that describe how the CARESSES robot will interact with individuals belonging to different cultures. This approach highlights the ethical implications of the robot's behavior early in the design process, thus enabling researchers to identify and engage with ethical problems proactively.

The functionalities and behaviours of socially assistive robots for the care of older people are usually defined by the robot's designers with limited room for runtime adaptation to meet the preferences, expectations and needs of the assisted person. However, adaptation plays a crucial role for the robot's acceptability and ultimately for its effectiveness. Culture, which deeply influences a person's preferences and habits, can be viewed as an invaluable “enabling technology” to achieve such level of adaptation. This paper discusses how guidelines describing culturally competent assistive behaviours can be encoded in a robot to effectively tune its actions, gestures and words. The proposed system is implemented on a Pepper robot and tested with an Indian persona, whose habits and preferences the robot discovers and adapts to at runtime.

Cultural competence is a well known requirement for an effective healthcare, widely investigated in the nursing literature. We claim that personal assistive robots should likewise be culturally competent, aware of general cultural characteristics and of the different forms they take in different individuals, and sensitive to cultural differences while perceiving, reasoning, and acting. Drawing inspiration from existing guidelines for culturally competent healthcare and the state-of-the-art in culturally competent robotics, we identify the key robot capabilities which enable culturally competent behaviours and discuss methodologies for their development and evaluation.