Seniors’ Sensing of Agents’ Personality from Facial Expressions

Esposito, Anna; Schlögl, Stephan; Amorese, Terry; Esposito, Antonietta M.; Torres, M. Inés; Masucci, Francesco; Cordasco, Gennaro

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-94274-2_63

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 11 publications

(10 reference statements)

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“…Thus, it include factors such as economic status, emotional problems and social relations. This is a subjective indicator based on surveys, perception records and/or self-assessments 8 .…”

Section: Defining the Target Populationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first experiment with the aim to build and evaluate such a questionnaire (and start collecting said data) was conducted in Italy and involved 45 healthy seniors (50% female), aged 65+ [8]. As this study was conducted before any of the agents described in Section 2 were built, our stimuli were based upon the four conversational agents proposed by the Semaine project 12 , each possessing different personality features able to arise user specific emotional states i.e., Poppy (female, expressing optimism), Obadiah (male, expressing pessimism), Spike (male, expressing aggression) and Prudence (female, expressing a high degree of pragmatism) [20].…”

Section: Aspects Of User Acceptancementioning

confidence: 99%

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The EMPATHIC Project: Mid-term Achievements

Torres,

Olaso,

Montenegro

et al. 2021

Preprint

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The goal of active aging is to promote changes in the elderly community so as to maintain an active, independent and socially-engaged lifestyle. Technological advancements currently provide the necessary tools to foster and monitor such processes. This paper reports on mid-term achievements of the European H2020 EMPATHIC project, which aims to research, innovate, explore and validate new interaction paradigms and platforms for future generations of personalized virtual coaches to assist the elderly and their carers to reach the active aging goal, in the vicinity of their home. The project focuses on evidence-based, user-validated research and integration of intelligent technology, and context sensing methods through automatic voice, eye and facial analysis, integrated with visual and spoken dialogue system capabilities. In this paper, we describe the current status of the system, with a special emphasis on its components and their integration, the creation of a Wizard of Oz platform, and findings gained from user interaction studies conducted throughout the first 18 months of the project. Pre-print, 2019, Greece CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Interactive systems and tools; Empirical studies in HCI; Interaction techniques; • Applied computing → Health informatics.

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“…Thus, it include factors such as economic status, emotional problems and social relations. This is a subjective indicator based on surveys, perception records and/or self-assessments 8 .…”

Section: Defining the Target Populationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Aspects Of User Acceptancementioning

confidence: 99%

The EMPATHIC Project: Mid-term Achievements

Torres,

Olaso,

Montenegro

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A first pilot experiment, focusing on user requirements and expectations with respect to participants' age and familiarity with technological devices (such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets) showed that, as for gender, elders prefer to be assisted by female agents (Esposito et al 2018b). In this context, an ad-hoc questionnaire was developed to assess senior's preferences, expectations and requirements, in order to customize the consequently developed EMPATHIC-VC to the needs of the targeted end-user population, i.e.…”

Section: The User-centered Iterative Design For Elders' Virtual Agentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of the interaction between elderly people and a simulated virtual coach

Justo

Zouari

Palmero

et al. 2020

J Ambient Intell Human Comput

Self Cite

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The EMPATHIC project develops and validates new interaction paradigms for personalized virtual coaches (VC) to promote healthy and independent aging. To this end, the work presented in this paper is aimed to analyze the interaction between the EMPATHIC-VC and the users. One of the goals of the project is to ensure an end-user driven design, involving senior users from the beginning and during each phase of the project. Thus, the paper focuses on some sessions where the seniors carried out interactions with a Wizard of Oz driven, simulated system. A coaching strategy based on the GROW model was used throughout these sessions so as to guide interactions and engage the elderly with the goals of the project. In this interaction framework, both the human and the system behavior were analyzed. The way the wizard implements the GROW coaching strategy is a key aspect of the system behavior during the interaction. The language used by the virtual agent as well as his or her physical aspect are also important cues that were analyzed. Regarding the user behavior, the vocal communication provides information about the speaker’s emotional status, that is closely related to human behavior and which can be extracted from the speech and language analysis. In the same way, the analysis of the facial expression, gazes and gestures can provide information on the non verbal human communication even when the user is not talking. In addition, in order to engage senior users, their preferences and likes had to be considered. To this end, the effect of the VC on the users was gathered by means of direct questionnaires. These analyses have shown a positive and calm behavior of users when interacting with the simulated virtual coach as well as some difficulties of the system to develop the proposed coaching strategy.

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“…The study was "a qualitative interview study with five seniors and six students" and showed that senior users prefer embodied human like agents over machine or animal-like ones. No information were obtained on the gender of the agents as well as their pragmatic and hedonic The first experiment with the aim to build and evaluate such a questionnaire (and start collecting said data) was conducted in Italy and involved 45 healthy seniors (50% female), aged 65+ [8]. As this study was conducted before any of the agents described in Section 2.6 were built, our stimuli were based upon the four conversational agents proposed by the Semaine project 12 , each possessing different personality features able to arise user specific emotional states i.e.,…”

Section: Aspects Of User Acceptancementioning

confidence: 99%

The EMPATHIC project

Torres

Olaso

Montenegro

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The goal of active aging is to promote changes in the elderly community so as to maintain an active, independent and socially-engaged lifestyle. Technological advancements currently provide the necessary tools to foster and monitor such processes. This paper reports on mid-term achievements of the European H2020 EMPATHIC project, which aims to research, innovate, explore and validate new interaction paradigms and platforms for future generations of personalized virtual coaches to assist the elderly and their carers to reach the active aging goal, in the vicinity of their home. The project focuses on evidence-based, user-validated research and integration of intelligent technology, and context sensing methods through automatic voice, eye and facial analysis, integrated with visual and spoken dialogue system capabilities. In this paper, we describe the current status of the system, with a special emphasis on its components and their integration, the creation of a Wizard of Oz platform, and findings gained from user interaction studies conducted throughout the first 18 months of the project. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Interactive systems and tools; Empirical studies in HCI; Interaction techniques; • Applied computing → Health informatics.

show abstract

Seniors’ Sensing of Agents’ Personality from Facial Expressions

Cited by 9 publications

References 11 publications

The EMPATHIC Project: Mid-term Achievements

The EMPATHIC Project: Mid-term Achievements

Analysis of the interaction between elderly people and a simulated virtual coach

The EMPATHIC project

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