The Intelligent Butler: A Virtual Agent for Disabled and Elderly People Assistance

摘要

Social assistance constitutes an increasing problem in developed countries, which canbe considered from two dimensions: the home and the hospital frameworks. Anyway, most of thetasks have to do with aiding people with limitations in complex environments as a hospital or ahouse. Intelligent agents constitute a powerful approach in designing computer systems makingpossible the interaction of the users (elderly and disabled people) with the elements of a domoticsenvironment. Such a purpose can be achieved through the unification of artificial intelligencetechniques, virtual reality, multimodal interfaces and digital nets with domotics services. This pa-per describes the design and implementation of the prototype for a virtual agent capable of attend-ing disabled people in a home environment. The results are shown through a computer programthat simulates the behaviour of the agent in developing some typical functions.