# CHARMIE: A Collaborative Healthcare and Home Service and Assistant Robot for Elderly Care
###### Abstract  
The global population is ageing at an unprecedented rate. With changes in life expectancy across the world, three major issues arise: an increasing proportion of senior citizens; cognitive and physical problems progressively affecting the elderly; and a growing number of single-person households. The available data proves the ever-increasing necessity for efficient elderly care solutions such as healthcare service and assistive robots. Additionally, such robotic solutions provide safe healthcare assistance in public health emergencies such as the SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19). CHARMIE is an anthropomorphic collaborative healthcare and domestic assistant robot capable of performing generic service tasks in non-standardised healthcare and domestic environment settings. The combination of its hardware and software solutions demonstrates map building and self-localisation, safe navigation through dynamic obstacle detection and avoidance, different human-robot interaction systems, speech and hearing, pose/gesture estimation and household object manipulation. Moreover, CHARMIE performs end-to-end chores in nursing homes, domestic houses, and healthcare facilities. Some examples of these chores are to help users transport items, fall detection, tidying up rooms, user following, and set up a table. The robot can perform a wide range of chores, either independently or collaboratively. CHARMIE provides a generic robotic solution such that older people can live longer, more independent, and healthier lives. service robot; assistant robot; collaborative robot; healthcare; elderly care; intelligent systems; COVID-19  
T.R. These statistics/data prove the growing need for efficient elderly care solutions regarding therapy, rehabilitation, companions and activity planning, but most importantly, healthcare robotics [6; 7; 8; 9] that are capable of aiding in day-to-day tasks, collaboratively or independently. Healthcare generic service and assistive robots can provide practical help to increase the elderly population's life quality, improving cognitive and physical health. These robots can play an essential role concerning healthcare support and independent life, especially when problems related to ageing start to appear. Moreover, service robots provide safe healthcare assistance in public health emergencies such as the SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19) [10; 11; 12]. The Collaborative Healthcare/Home Assistant Robot by Minho Industrial Electronics (CHARMIE), represented in Figure 1, is an anthropomorphic healthcare and domestic service and assistive robot capable of performing tasks in non-standardised environmental settings. The social goal of the CHARMIE project is the development of a robot capable of aiding in nursing homes, healthcare facilities and domestic houses, among other settings. The scientific objective of CHARMIE is the development of a multifaceted anthropomorphic robot capable of performing a broad set of tasks based solely on machine learning solutions that allow the robot to learn how to perform and improve tasks via observation and trial-and-error direct interaction with the environment. Some service robots are already being implemented in geriatric care [13]. The development of such robots is encouraged with funding from the European Union with projects such as Hobbit [14], ENRICHME [15], ARNA [16] and Sobi [17]. These four robots go beyond the simpler pet-like social companion robots already possessing sensors and actuators that allow them to perform more complex tasks. Focusing on enhancing older people's well-being, some examples of tasks already performed are user entertainment, object manipulation and transportation, empathic and social human-robot interaction, monitoring persons and home-related chores. MOnarCH [18] presents a multi-robot cognitive system whose operation is already being tested in hospitals.