University hosts Turing Workshop on 'Robotics and AI for Health and Social Care'

The University of Manchester hosted the Turing Institute Workshop on 'Robotics and AI for Health and Social Care' on 28-29 October.

This was chaired by Angelo Cangelosi and Chris Todd, from MICRA, and Heather Draper from Warwick University.

This workshop’s aim was to achieve a shared awareness of the strengths and complementarity of UK and International projects in this field, to identify the main research challenges, and to foster interaction and collaboration.

Academic speakers included experts already involved in assistive robotics and AI projects in the UK (eg from Bristol, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Hertfordshire and Plymouth), Europe (Alberto Borghese, Coordinator of the H2020 project MoveCare, and Erica Palmerini, Coordinator of RobotLaw project), and overseas (Yoshio Matsumoto, Team Leader, Assistive Robotics Research Team at AIST Japan; Bill Huang, CEO of CloudMinds Robotics in China).

The workshop put great emphasis on ethics and law for healthcare technologies and for responsible research and innovation.

One of the main deliverables was the identification of short- to medium-term research priorities and challenges for future collaborative funding.