Project:EMPATHIC -Empathic,
Expressive, Advanced Virtual Coach to Improve Independent Healthy-Life-Years of
the Elderly
Duration: 36 months (from 01/11/2017 to 31/10/2020)
Coordinator:University of the
Basque Country, Spain
Partners:
OSATEK S.A (Spain)
University of Oslo (Norway)
TUNSTALL Healthcare Ltd (United Kingdom)
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
(Israel)
Intelligent Voice Ltd. (United Kingdom)
Acapela Group S.A (Belgium)
Institute Mines Telecom (France)
Universitàdella Campania Luigi (Italy)
Association E-Seniors
(France)
Objectives: The EMPATHIC Research & Innovation project
will research, innovate and validate new paradigms, laying the foundation for
future generations of Personalised Virtual Coaches to help elderly people to
live independently.
- The wellness coaching advice will promote
healthy habits and behaviour, by challenging each user to transform their
personal goals and needs into actions.
- The EMPATHIC Virtual Coach (EMPATHIC-VC) will
engage the healthy-senior user to take care of potential chronic diseases,
maintain a healthy diet, have adequate physical activity as well as encourage
social engagement, thus contributing to the older adults’ ability to maintain a
satisfying and independent lifestyle.
- The
EMPATHIC-VC will motivate the user through a friendly virtual coach to reach
pre-set benefits, whose achievement will be measured through project-defined
metrics. The ambition of the project is to create a personal, friendly and
familiar environment for the users, avoiding the threatening effects of
unfamiliar new gadgets or an excessive focus on medical supervision.
- The project will look beyond the basic
medical and physical needs of a person, to the link between body and emotional
well-being. The EMPATHIC-VC will be capable of perceiving the emotional and
social state of a person, in the learned context of the senior users’
expectations and requirements, and their personal history, and will respond
adaptively to his/her needs.
To achieve these goals, this project will develop
innovative multimodal face and speech analytics, adaptive spoken dialogue
systems, Intelligent computational models and natural human-computer interfaces,
resulting in an emotionally-expressive virtual coach, designed to help aging
users and their carers. Building upon neuroscience
research, the project will use unobtrusive remote technologies to extract
physiological markers of emotional states in real-time. The EMPATHIC-VC will
monitor facial cues and speech style that underpin the user’s basic neural
function, and will formulate online adaptive responses, facilitating interaction
through mimicking, in turn promoting empathy and support with the user.