Putting social robots into the private homes of community-dwelling older adults in Europe and Japan for a longer period of time (e.g. 6 months) is a huge challenge, due to several reasons:

• First, there is always the need fulfilment aspect, which needs personalization of contents and abilities of the robot to the preferences of the older adult users.
• Second, there are the intercultural issues in different countries, but also the long time frame plays an important role because the interactions should not become boring over time.
• Third, the natural language understanding might also be either a barrier or an enabler of the long-term use for older adults from different countries.
• Fourth, there are also ethical issues which needs to be taken into account, like the GDPR and APPI.

The European-Japanese research project e-VITA aims to tackle all those topics and challenges in term of joint developments between Europe and Japan, taking into account also standardization and interoperability issues.

In spring/summer 2023, the e-VITA demonstrator will be put into 120 households in Europe and Japan, and the 6-month study design incl. a control group will examine different types of social and religious robots as well as other NLP devices (3D-hologram and simple speakers) in order to find the most suitable solution for robot-based active and healthy ageing support of community-dwelling older adults in Europe and Japan.