Students at the Maharashtra Institute of Technology (MIT), Pune, have developed a robot, powered by IBM’s Watson platform. Meant to assist senior citizens, the robot is called Chintu. It is less than 2 feet tall and draws from Watson’s domain knowledge. The robot was developed with a grant worth Rs. 10 lakh, from IBM.
Chintu can move its hands and read books to an audience and uses Watson’s cognitive intelligence to do so. The robot is meant to assist senior citizens to conduct everyday tasks, like reading books and newspapers, generating reminders on daily medications etc, said Vrushali Kulkarni, Professor and Head of Computer Engineering Department at MIT Pune.
The robot is not ready to be used for mainstream applications, but the students will reportedly put in some more work to add functionalities to it. You can watch Chintu, also called the NAO robot, in action with the video embedded below.