SPRING (Socially Pertinent Robots in Gerontological Healthcare) , a four-year project funded by Horizon2020, will develop Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) with the capacity to perform multi-person interactions and open domain social conversation for the first time in a healthcare setting. The work builds on the success of Heriot-Watt University’s Amazon Alexa Prize conversational AI system `Alana’.

The project will focus on supporting elderly patients by carefully coupling scientific findings and user-focussed technological developments to bring social robots into gerontological healthcare.

The aim of project FEATHER is to work with stakeholders to co-design new tools and machine learning-based methods for early recognition of urinary tract infections to enable longer and healthier independent living.

The PRIME (Protecting Minority Ethnic Communities Online) project, funded by UKRI, aims to increase understanding of minority ethnic communities’ online experiences, particularly key services related to health, housing and energy consumption. It also aims to increase understanding of the types and nature of online harms that may be experienced by such individuals in their use of the internet.

Investigating how to build, maintain and manage trust in robotic and autonomous systems, The Trust Node brings together a multidisciplinary team from the fields of AI, Robotics, Engineering, Linguistics, Psychology and Cognitive Science.