Assistive technologies increasingly support independence, accessibility, and safety for older adults, people with disabilities, and individuals requiring continuous care. Two major categories are virtual assistive systems and robotic assistive systems operating in physical environments. Although both offer significant benefits, they introduce important security and privacy risks due to their reliance on artificial intelligence, network connectivity, and sensor-based perception. Virtual systems are primarily exposed to threats involving data privacy, unauthorized access, and adversarial voice manipulation. In contrast, robotic systems introduce additional cyber-physical risks such as sensor spoofing, perception manipulation, command injection, and physical safety hazards. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of security and privacy challenges across these systems. We develop a unified comparative threat-modeling framework that enables structured analysis of attack surfaces, risk profiles, and safety implications across both systems. Moreover, we provide design recommendations for developing secure, privacy-preserving, and trustworthy assistive technologies.

翻译：辅助技术日益支持老年人、残障人士及需要持续照护个体的独立性、无障碍环境及安全性。两大主要类别是虚拟辅助系统和在物理环境中运行的机器人辅助系统。尽管两者均带来显著益处，但由于其依赖人工智能、网络连接及基于传感器的感知能力，也引入了重要的安全与隐私风险。虚拟系统主要面临涉及数据隐私、未授权访问及对抗性语音操控的威胁。相较之下，机器人系统则额外引入传感器欺骗、感知操控、命令注入及物理安全危害等网络物理风险。本文对这两类系统中的安全与隐私挑战进行了比较分析。我们开发了一个统一的比较性威胁建模框架，能够对两类系统的攻击面、风险概况及安全影响进行结构化分析。此外，我们还为开发安全、保护隐私且值得信赖的辅助技术提供了设计建议。