Assistive social robots for people with special needs

An increasing number of elderly people leads to demand for social robots to support health care and independent life. An overview of various potential applications of social robots is provided in this paper. In addition, the latest research progress in our institute is presented, i.e., multi-party interaction, gesture recognition, affective computing, and attention capture. All the research and applications demonstrate that social robots are good assistive robots for people with special needs.