Barbara Di Eugenio is co-PI on a new NSF award (PI: Milos Zefran, co-PI: Jezekiel Ben-Arie) that aims at developing assistive robots for the elderly. The team will focus on the technological challenge of creating an effective interface that can seamlessly integrate speech, gestures and haptic signals (force exchange). These different modalities co-constrain the interpretation of what the user is communicating to the robot. This project aims at robots that can assist elderly people in performing mundane, daily activities, from the more basic (getting out of bed), to the more complex (cooking). Such robots would help the elderly stay in their homes longer, with great benefits to the elderly people themselves, their caregivers, and society at large. This award is a collaboration between ECE and CS at UIC, and Mark Foreman, a UIC professor emeritus who is now with the Department of Gerontological Nursing at Rush University.

The UIC Press Release can be found here.

The Chicago Tribune news can be found here