In the past few years, significant progress has been made in AI technology development to assist and support vulnerable groups such as the elderly. We have also seen some domestic robots appearing on the market. In parallel, the population census of 2021 showed that the elderly make up for 20% of Hong Kong’s population, a number that has doubled in the past 10 years. With one of the sharpest growth of elderly population in the world, and a limited health care and medical workforce, the need for machine-assisted care is urgent. Hong Kong has the highest life expectancy in the world largely thanks to its excellent public medical care system including timely response and treatment of stroke and heart attack patients, as well as speech and physical therapy for the elderly. With a falling fertility rate and an early retirement age, existing welfare infrastructure will be increasingly under duress and a more integrated, age-friendly, and wellness-oriented solution toward better healthcare services for the aging population is eminently important. In this talk, I will highlight how a multidisciplinary group of researchers at the Centre for AI Research at HKUST have joined forces to tackle this challenge by combining a human-centric approach coupled with the latest technological development in AI and Robotics.
