On September 19th MARIO was featured on the first issue of "Le Buone Notizie" ("The Good News"), the new weekly insert of Corriere della Sera about social issues. Corriere della Sera is the largest circulation newspaper in Italy, with 250,000 copies being sold and around 3 million readers.

With the exit of Robosoft, the consortium was in part left without an important aspect of our exploitation strategy – the manufacturer of the robotic platforms. Collaboration is still possible with Kompai Robotics. To take control of the scenario and to not risk losing momentum, opportunities and networks established by the project, R2M in parallel to the project activities invested in and committed to a distributorship with Zora Robotics for the sale, distribution and support of Zorabots in Italy.

We are all aware that Europe has the highest prevalence of dementia in the world: seven million people are currently affected and this is projected to increase to 13.4 million by 2050. In the management of the health and care of dementia patients, the caregivers play a pivotal role, but although caregiving may be rewarding, providing care to a family member is stressful.

If you know someone who is interested in the different areas related to Dementia, Active Ageing and Robotics forward this email and ask him/her to join our MARIONet.

Our MARIO robot met the students of two high schools in San Giovanni Rotondo in the conference hall of the IRCCS Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza Hospital. The participants had the possibility to learn about the MARIO project and to directly interact with the robot.

Seven months after the last general assembly meeting, it is almost time for all the partners of the MARIO project consortium to meet again. The last general assembly meeting of the project will be held from 8 to 10 November in the beautiful city of Rome, at the ISTC-CNR's headquarters.

Aimee Robbins-van Wynsberghe works at Delft University in the Netherlands as an Assistant Professor and is also Co-director of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics with an office in Hague. Aimee is also the ethics adviser for an industrial robots project on Robot Operating Systems and a member of MARIO Ethics & Privacy Supervisory board. Last August Aimee gave an interview to the Quartz magazine...

MARIO included in the 'World Trends 2018' report issued by KOTRA, the Korean Trade-Investment Promotion Agency!

The recent report titled "Application of novel industrial scale robot automation in elderly care" from VTT Finland raised a lot of discussions in the robotics for elderly care domain. MARIO being an EU funded project on robots for care of persons with dementia is obviously one of the interested stakeholders that should pay attention to it and take its conclusions into account. In our next newsletter we will accommodate an interview with Dr Marketta Niemelä Project Manager of the ROSE project and Dr Hannu Lehtinen, author of the aforementioned report that covers a lot of interesting subjects on the future of robotics. As an appetizer we are publishing today a short extract of the full interview.