# CHARMIE: A Collaborative Healthcare and Home Service and Assistant Robot for Elderly Care
## 4 Conclusions  
A description of hardware and software solutions for healthcare and domestic collaborative service and assistant robot, CHARMIE, is presented in this article. Additionally, results from the development of the initial prototype and the first set of user trials in a controlled laboratory setting focusing on developing an assistive care robot for older adults are described. The focus of the chores presented displays several different scenarios where CHARMIE can directly impact the quality of life of older people, mainly regarding physical safety, but also concerning social interactions and mental health. The majority of the robot's tasks designed for geriatric care involve fall detection and prevention, such as patrolling through nursing or domestic homes and picking up objects from the floor. In addition to the tasks demonstrated, CHARMIE can also work as a social company robot, asking questions throughout the day, allowing the user to play some games in its multimodal user interface and reminding the users of their schedules. Even though most tasks mainly aid the elderly, these chores can be adapted to be more oriented to healthcare workers or people with reduced mobility. From a different perspective, due to the difficulties brought by the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns, robots such as CHARMIE provide a safer solution to overcome this disease's challenges. Robots provide a superlative solution, since the virus cannot replicate itself in a robot as it does in a human and drastically reduces person-to-person contacts. Elderly care facilities and all other healthcare-related environments are particularly at risk of heavy breakouts since these encompass a very vulnerable population. Without a robotic solution, residents without the virus inside such facilities face a higher chance of contamination, which may happen through asymptomatic healthcare professionals. In addition to all of the social and mental health tasks social robots can perform, service and assistant robots such as CHARMIE can provide more direct help not only to patients, but also to healthcare professionals in a wide range of healthcare facilities. The longevity of the virus has dictated that all healthcare workers undergo very long working shifts, with low sleeping schedules, and in many situations being away from their families. This can lead to healthcare workers reaching a state of high fatigue and burnout in overburdened health systems, which can be easy if some of the tasks are performed by healthcare robots such as CHARMIE. Some examples of tasks are: transporting goods, providing patients information, patrolling the facilities, and sending an alert when any unexpected patient behaviour is detected. Additionally, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the desired tests meant to be performed on real world environments, in this case in two nursing homes, two domestic homes and one hospital, initially scheduled for 2020 had to be indefinitely postponed as mandated by the national public health committee. As short-term and middle-term objectives, novel concepts and tasks are projected to be developed and implemented in CHARMIE. The robot can successfully detect falls and prevent some scenarios where older people might fall by picking up items from the floor. However, one of the most significant difficulties regarding movement and mobility of older people happens when trying to get up from a sitting position, which is more aggravated in single-person households. This scenario happens several times during the day: getting out of bed, after a meal, when getting up from the sofa where the elderly do not have enough strength or apply too much force and lose balance, which results in dangerous falls. The goal is to provide active help to older people when trying to stand up. Another goal is to increase the robot's working area in buildings with more than one floor.