During the past two decades, several initiatives have sought to design, develop, and deploy social agents for care in different environments. Current assistive and rehabilitation robots often struggle to integrate personalisation, continuity of care, and user engagement, resulting in limited long-term effectiveness. To achieve these outcomes, agents must be socially competent, such as understanding and adapting to the needs of the user.

This half-day workshop focuses on advancing research and development of real-world deployments of socially-competent agents that care. The main objectives of the workshop include: Exploring how multi-modal interaction and intelligent interfaces enhance assistive and rehabilitation robots; Fostering multidisciplinary dialogue between roboticists, AI researchers, clinicians and industry partners; Identifying open challenges toward sustainable and inclusive rehabilitation robotics; Discussing the challenges of operating in real environments; Presenting real use case discussing the sustainability and impact of the proposed services; Discussing value-based design, inclusiveness, and empathetic design for long-term human-robot interaction across rehabilitation and assistive robot applications.

This event is promoted by the Fit for Medical Robotics (Fit4MedRob) initiative, a national research project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, addressing clinical, social, and technological challenges related to rehabilitation and personal care for individuals with motor, sensory, or cognitive impairments. It is further supported by the hospital@home project, researching sustainable healthy ageing via a 'virtual ward at home' funded by the Dinwoodie charitable company.

We invite researchers and practitioners to submit work on real-world deployments focusing on, but not limited to, the following areas:

• Multi-Modal Human-Robot Interaction for Assistive and Rehabilitation

• Intelligent and Adaptive Interfaces for Personalised Therapy

• Social and Cognitive Robotics for Behavioural Change and Motivation

• AI-Driven Methods for Cognitive Rehabilitation and Neuro-Assistive Support 

• Machine Learning for Modelling Patient Engagement and Progress

• Cognitive Architectures for Human-Centered Rehabilitation Robots

• Integration of Advanced Robotic Systems (exoskeletons, smart prostheses, wearable devices) with Social Interaction Capabilities

• Value-Based Design

• Inclusiveness and Empathetic Design

• Long-Term Interaction 

Submission Details

We welcome submissions in two formats: 

1) Extended abstracts (2 pages, excluding references) to be published on the workshop website. 

2) Short papers (at least 5 pages, excluding references) to be published in the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA) workshop proceedings series and indexed in Scopus.

Submissions should present original contributions that have not been previously published and all submissions will undergo a single-blind peer-review process. Submissions should be in PDF-format using the CEUR-WS single-column format. Please submit to EasyChair, deadline May 1 (AoE).