  As telecommunications technology progresses, telehealth frameworks are
becoming more widely adopted in the context of long-term care (LTC) for older
adults, both in care facilities and in homes. Today, robots could assist
healthcare workers when they provide care to elderly patients, who constitute a
particularly vulnerable population during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous work
on user-centered design of assistive technologies in LTC facilities for seniors
has identified positive impacts. The need to deal with the effects of the
COVID-19 pandemic emphasizes the benefits of this approach, but also highlights
some new challenges for which robots could be interesting solutions to be
deployed in LTC facilities. This requires customization of telecommunication
and audio/video/data processing to address specific clinical requirements and
needs. This paper presents OpenTera, an open source telehealth framework,
aiming to facilitate prototyping of such solutions by software and robotic
designers. Designed as a microservice-oriented platform, OpenTera is an
end-to-end solution that employs a series of independent modules for tasks such
as data and session management, telehealth, daily assistive tasks/actions,
together with smart devices and environments, all connected through the
framework. After explaining the framework, we illustrate how OpenTera can be
used to implement robotic solutions for different applications identified in
LTC facilities and homes, and we describe how we plan to validate them through
field trials.
