Demographic growth and rise in the average age of the population is increasing the demand for the elderly assistance. Health care oriented ambient intelligence technologies are fundamental to support elderly peoples' autonomy. In this paper, we present a smart home system that is able to recognize human activities and is integrated with a proactive vocal assistant. We chose one of possible user scenarios to show the performance of this smart home system and to perform a preliminary comparison between users' experience while watching videos of a volunteer interacting with an embodied versus a not-embodied assistant. The scenario is recorded from the user's point of view, while the user interacts with a robot assistant or a simple vocal assistant. The results of the User Experience Questionnaire show that participants found the robot assistant considerably more attractive, innovative and stimulating in comparison to the vocal assistant.

翻译：人口增长与人口平均年龄的上升正加剧对老年人辅助的需求。面向医疗保健的环境智能技术是支撑老年人自主生活的关键基础。本文提出了一种能够识别人类活动并集成主动语音助手的智能家居系统。我们选取了一种可能的用户场景，用以展示该智能家居系统的性能，并初步比较用户在观看志愿者与具身/非具身助手互动视频时的体验差异。该场景以用户第一视角进行录制，内容为用户分别与机器人助手及简单语音助手的交互过程。用户体验问卷结果显示，相较于语音助手，参与者认为机器人助手更具吸引力、创新性和启发性。