Meet Alfred: the student-built robot butler helping older people live at home

Alfred can find your glasses, remind you about your medication, and — most importantly — notice if you fall and call for help. The voice-controlled assistive robot is the senior design project of a team at Cedarville University in Ohio, built for a simple, pressing reason: the world's population is ageing faster than its supply of carers, and most older people want to stay in their own homes. Alfred combines computer vision and voice recognition to identify household objects and hazards and to understand spoken requests. He is still a prototype in a university lab — but he is an early sketch of a future where growing old at home comes with a capable, patient helper rolling quietly from room to room.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation