## 1 Introduction  
_Comprehensive geriatric assessment_ (CGA) is a multidimensional and multidisciplinary diagnostic instrument that helps provide personalized care to older adults, by evaluating their state of health [1]. This evaluation is based on extensive data collection about the frail older person's medical, psychosocial, and functional limitations, in order to develop a coordinated plan to maximize overall health with aging [2]. Being an interdisciplinary effort, it requires the coordination of several clinical professionals [3]. This coordination rests, for a large part, on patient data sharing. Improving the diagnosis, creating correct, customized and proportional therapeutic plans, increasing functional autonomy, and also reducing complications during hospitalizations and mortality, are some of CGA's benefits. In the social and economic context of growing ageing populations, CGA has the potential to contribute efficiently to frailty prevention. However, the associated drawbacksare increased costs, resources and data management. The geriatrician from the University hospital collaborating on the project explains: _\"The problem today, regardless of the country, is that there is a lack of geriatricians in relation to the needs of the population, and that is a constant. Geriatrics, or geriatricians, can absorb at best 10% of the entire body of older people. We should be able to absorb a greater number of frail patients in order to try to render a service to a greater number of people\"_.  
CGA is usually carried out every 6 months and involves both patients and their relatives. It comprises three different types of activities: clinical interview, multidimensional assessment and customized care plan. First, a clinical interview allows the patient and relatives to discuss the older adults' health problems with the physician. Then, multidimensional clinical tests are performed to evaluate the overall patient status. Finally, taking into account the evidence gathered during the two previous phases and the patient's evolution since the last CGA session, physicians create a personalized care plan. A typical CGA session takes about 3 h of a clinician's time. Some of the activities require the clinical staff to be present, but other ones, particularly the multidimensional assessment, are standard tasks suitable for automation and/or parallelization (see [4, 5] for more detail). Indeed, medical experts can save time and effort if provided with interactive tools to efficiently assist them in doing CGAs, managing either standardized tests or data collection. On the basis of knowledge capitalized since the beginning of the project, the research hypothesis was that a robotic solution would allow a gain in the efficiency of geriatric follow-up: automated data collection, better backup and the sharing of secure data, better management of caregivers' time on high value-added activities, such as the development of the personalized care plan. Discharging part of the CGA on a robot would allow clinicians to focus on activities with more added value, such as deciding, together with the patient and relatives, the appropriate care plan. This can be summarized as follows: clinicians' activities are maximized on essential activities, while repetitive or standardized tasks can be delegated to the robot. This division of tasks is in line with the ethical principles, which have guided this research all the way through, and with the robotic principle [6], which have been applied from the beginning of this research. The main principle is that replacing clinicians and caretakers by robots is not an issue, because precisely, being given the high added value of the activities that they keep, clinicians cannot be replaced by the CLARC(CLARC is the name retained for the robot in line with the project's name: ECHORD++ CLARC (the European Clearing House for Open Robotics Development) project (No. FP7-ICT-601116)\") robot. Instead, the activities--that are repetitive, time-consuming and of low added value--are delegated to the robot.