David Lake, CEO and co-founder of Awakening Health, describes the company’s plan with Hanson Robotics and SingularityNET to develop Grace, a socially engaging medical assistant for elder care, alongside demonstrations and remarks from Sophia, David Hanson, Ben Goertzel, and Sarah Hoyt of Connected Living.
David Lake presents Awakening Health as a collaboration between Hanson Robotics, SingularityNET, and Singularity Studio. Its first focus is Grace, a medical assistant built on the Sophia 2020 platform for elder care. The team aims to combine social interaction with health monitoring and support.
Sophia describes conversational support, goal-directed dialogue, and assessments of a patient’s responsiveness and mood. Demonstrations show temperature checks, exercise prompts, guided meditation, and questions about a person’s life. The team says interaction data could help care staff follow up and inform later conversations.
The presenters cite earlier work in elder care, autism support, and guided meditation, including a study they say found lower blood pressure and heart rate after robot-led sessions. They outline a plan for clinical trials and application refinement over six months, broader deployments within twelve months, and a production ramp by eighteen months. They also describe smaller, lower-cost robots and virtual agents as ways to reach more users.
Ben Goertzel describes SingularityNET as a way for AI services to work together, with OpenCog and neural-symbolic systems planned for Grace’s care-focused software. Sarah Hoyt says Connected Living will contribute a communications platform spanning staff tools, mobile devices, tablets, and robotics. The partnership is aimed at connecting seniors with families and supporting engagement during isolation.
In response to concerns about human-like robots, the presenters say reactions vary: many people engage strongly, while some find the appearance unsettling, and repeated contact may ease hesitation. They describe a layered AI system combining rules, natural-language dialogue, and learned models, along with sensors for navigation, voice, faces, and vital signs. The team frames companionship and cognitive stimulation as central uses in care settings.
Briefs summarise talks and interviews; timestamps open the video at that moment. Claims in a talk are the speaker's own.
David Hanson, CEO of Hanson Robotics, talks with Dinis Guarda about human-centered robotics, Sophia’s development, and how AI, art, and community could shape technology.
Dr. David Hanson, CEO and founder of Hanson Robotics, discusses the Grace healthcare robot, Sophia 2020, and decentralized AI with Sophia at SingularityNET’s D.OS 2020 keynote.
David Hanson, CEO of Hanson Robotics, discusses expressive humanoid and affordable home robots with Tom Green on Asian Robotics Review’s Great Ideas in Robotics program, from Hong Kong.
David Hanson, founder and chief creative officer at Hanson Robotics, and CEO Jean discuss Little Sophia’s design, programming, capabilities, and launch plans at the company’s Hong Kong facility.
Ben Goertzel, AI researcher and leader of the OpenCog project at Hanson Robotics, discusses humanoid robots and artificial general intelligence with Sophia and Harlan onstage at RISE Conf in Hong Kong.
