“We believe that people need affordable solutions that are bespoke to their needs, and which provide maximal value by being modular in their functionality.” 

One aspect of healthy living that is easy to overlook is maintaining proper hydration – that is, making sure that we have enough to drink throughout the day. This is one of the areas where we think a robot could help: it could, for example, remind you to have a cup of tea if it’s been a while since lunchtime, or simply bring you a drink while you’re sitting watching TV.

But staying hydrated is only one of the many tasks that robots could help us with, and we don’t want to have to build a new robot for each of these tasks: it would cost a lot to develop, and no one is going to want – or be able to afford – a dozen robots in their home! For this reason, we’re developing our robot – which we call Robobrico – to be what’s called a “modular robot”. This means that, although the basic robot stays the same, we can change a few parts and run a different program, and Robobrico could now be doing the vacuuming instead of making us a cup of tea.

But we have to take things step-by-step, so to begin with we’re thinking about how to keep people hydrated. To give us some ideas, we’ve asked the residents, and their family members and carers, of a supported living scheme for older people in Edinburgh for their thoughts. 

Based on their suggestions, we’re now developing a hydration module for Robobrico. Once it’s ready we’ll take it back to show the residents and, if it’s successful, we can start to think about other ways of using Robobrico to make their lives a little easier.