SPRING — Socially Pertinent Robots in Gerontological Healthcare — is an EU H2020-ICT research and innovation action (RIA). Eight partners: Inria Grenoble (coordinator), Università degli Studi di Trento, Czech Technical University Prague, Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, Bar-Ilan University Tel Aviv, ERM Automatismes Industriels Carpentras, PAL Robotics Barcelona, and Hôpital Broca Paris. Project duration: 48 months (1 Januray 2020 – 31 December 2023). To properly fulfil social roles and successfully execute social tasks, there is a crucial need for robots able to move, see, hear and communicate in complex and unstructured populated spaces. The overall objective of the SPRING project is to develop Socially Assistive Robots with the capacity of performing multi-person interactions and open-domain dialogue. This will require new developments over several scientific topics, namely computer vision, audio signal processing, spoken dialogue, machine learning, and robotics, as well as inter-topic developments, such as human behaviour analysis, audio-visual fusion, multi-modal dialogue, sensorimotor robot control. Altogether, SPRING plans to achieve a fine coupling between scientific findings and technological developments to bring social robots into gerontological healthcare.