This thesis presents the design of an assistive robotic system, developed to aid a growing elderly population in maintaining quality of life and age in place independently. The robot is designed to operate in a home environment and aid a person with the performance of independent activities of daily living, primarily focusing on guided meal preparation. This work begins with the development of a novel person-search approach using a time-discretized Hidden Markov Model (HMM). Subsequently the prototyping and development of the robotic system is discussed, followed by a benchmarking of the person-search system and an information gathering experiment evaluating the robot's interactive capabilities. Experiments show that the HMM-based person-search system is effective at locating a target person considerably faster than an uninformed baseline approach.