  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.
