**5. Conclusions**

Socioeconomic changes and the lack of healthcare professionals to cover the unceasing demand of services and care have led to the need for technological solutions to mitigate this situation. In addition to intelligently interacting with the environment, the techniques developed must be successfully adopted by users. In this sense, neuroscientific evidence shows that users, especially children, tend to engage with robots better than traditional screens and their design must make the user feel comfortable and increase their well-being. As a consequence, the scientific response to these issues is assistive robotics, and more precisely, socially assistive robotics, which integrates a human-robot interaction in a social way.

This paper presents an overview of the state-of-the-art SAR solutions for helping and assisting older adults in their daily activities, such as activity scheduling and rehabilitation; and for helping children with autism spectrum disorders by means of diagnosis and social therapies. These solutions benefit from new advances in artificial intelligence, as these increase the autonomy levels of assistance robots, allowing them to adapt to unforeseen circumstances without the direct intervention of a human. Thus, the advent of SAR along with AI can help users with their day-to-day living, promoting their daily functioning, well-being, and independence.

Despite the active development in (social) assistive technology, there is still work to be done. Indeed, the current solutions do not provide ideal solutions to all needs of people with disabilities, but the results are highly promising.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, E.M.M., F.E. and M.C.; methodology, E.M.M., F.E. and M.C.; software, E.M.M., F.E. and M.C.; validation, E.M.M., F.E. and M.C.; formal analysis,E.M.M., F.E. and M.C.; investigation, E.M.M., F.E. and M.C.; resources, E.M.M., F.E. and M.C.; writing—original draft preparation, E.M.M., F.E. and M.C.; writing—review and editing, E.M.M., F.E. and M.C.; visualization, E.M.M., F.E. and M.C.; supervision, E.M.M., F.E. and M.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was funded by the Spanish Government TIN2016-76515-R gran<sup>t</sup> for the COMBAHO project, supported with Feder funds. It has also been supported by Spanish grants for PhD studies ACIF/2017/243 and FPU16/00887.

**Acknowledgments:** Experiments were made possible by a generous hardware donation from NVIDIA.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
