  We explore new aspects of assistive living on smart human-robot interaction
(HRI) that involve automatic recognition and online validation of speech and
gestures in a natural interface, providing social features for HRI. We
introduce a whole framework and resources of a real-life scenario for elderly
subjects supported by an assistive bathing robot, addressing health and hygiene
care issues. We contribute a new dataset and a suite of tools used for data
acquisition and a state-of-the-art pipeline for multimodal learning within the
framework of the I-Support bathing robot, with emphasis on audio and RGB-D
visual streams. We consider privacy issues by evaluating the depth visual
stream along with the RGB, using Kinect sensors. The audio-gestural recognition
task on this new dataset yields up to 84.5%, while the online validation of the
I-Support system on elderly users accomplishes up to 84% when the two
modalities are fused together. The results are promising enough to support
further research in the area of multimodal recognition for assistive social
HRI, considering the difficulties of the specific task. Upon acceptance of the
paper part of the data will be publicly available.
