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Ageing in Europe comes more rapidly than many realize: In about 10 years, one fifth of the population will be 65+ with a further increase of 70% in the next 25 years. At the same time, healthcare is under extreme pressure due to budget cuts, limited resources and personnel together with increased demands. Robots may fulfill important tasks in this respect. Our research focuses on social robots to support tasks requiring interpersonal communication. Many moral concerns and objections are raised, however, in particular among care professionals. To examine the issue, we report on 1) a qualitative study among professional caregivers and 2) a documentary portraying healthy elderly meeting with Hanson’s Robokind “Alice”. Alice is under development in our lab, supplying her with abilities for emotional responses. The results show that the moral concerns are not in line with the benefits that the social robots appear to have for the lonely elderly. Our conclusion posits that new robot technology may not dehumanize care but rather may bring humanness back into professional health care. In C. Verdier, M. Bienkiewicz, A. Fred, H. Gamboa, & D. Elias (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Health Informatics (HEALTHINF) Jan. 12-15, 2015. Lisbon, Portugal (pp. 648-653). Lisbon, PT: SCITEPRESS

Medical texts (reports, articles, etc.) are usually written by professionals (physicians, medical researchers, etc.) who use their own language and communication style. On the other hand, these texts are often read by health consumers (as in the case of medical reports) who do not have the same skills and vocabularies of the experts and can have difficulties in text comprehension. To help a health consumer in understanding a medical text, it would be desirable to have an automatic system that, given a text written with medical (technical) terms, translates them in simple or plain language and provides additional information with the same kind of language. We have designed such a system. It processes online medical documents and provides health consumers with the needed information for their understanding. To this end, we use a medical vocabulary for finding the technical terms in the medical texts, a consumer health vocabulary (CHV) for translating the technical terms into their consumer equivalents and a health-consumer dictionary for finding supplementary information on the terms. We have built a prototype that processes Italian medical reports and uses infobuttons next to the technical terms for allowing easy retrieval of the desired information.