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Towards an Empathic Social Robot for Ambient Assisted Living

In the context of Ambient Assisted Living, assistance and care are delegated to the intelligence embedded in the environment that, in our opinion, should provide not only a task-oriented support but also an interface able to establish a social empathic relation with the user. This can be achieved, for instance, using a social assistive robot as interface towards the environment services. In the context of the NICA (Natural Interaction with a Caring Agent) project we developed the behavioral architecture of a social robot able to assist the user in the interaction with a smart home environment. In this paper we describe how this robot has been endowed with the capability of recognizing the user affective state from the combination of facial expressions and spoken utterances and to reason on in order to simulate an empathic behavior.