The EMPATHIC project

Abstract

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.

The EMPATHIC Virtual Coach: a demo

“…The key to using GROW successfully is first to spend sufficient time exploring the goals until the coached sets one which is both inspirational and stretching, and then to move through the sequence, including revisiting the goal if needed. Figure 2 shows the main steps of the methodology [9]. • WebRTC used on the client side for:…”

“…The EMPATHIC-VC includes male and female voices for each of the languages and cultures and implements neutral and positive moods. • Five different virtual agents designed to increase the user acceptance [7,9]. They have been enriched with animations and emotions to improve the interactivity.…”

“…In this paper we introduce a demonstration of the virtual coach session conducted by the EMPATHIC-VC. The main objective of the EMPATHIC project has been the design of a virtual coach to engage the healthy-senior user and reach pre-set benefits to enhance wellbeing through awareness of personal status, by improving diet and nutritional habits and by developing more physical and social activities [9]. The EMPATHIC approach addresses this objective through conversational interactions.…”

“…During the interactions the dialog manager (DM) develops coaching sessions guided by a GROW model [9] that is summarized in Section 2. The EMPATHIC-VC also includes multimodal human sensing modules aimed at getting the current emotional status of the end-user that will also have impact in the emotional behaviour of the VC resulting in an EMPATHIC communication model.…”

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

“…For simulating interactions with the EMPATHIC-VC, the WebWOZ wizard interface was further extended by an audio/video transmission and recording function based on the WebRTC standard, a graphical representation of the dialogue to help guide the wizard, and the possibility to upload and consequently integrate text-based utterances. In addition, the WebWOZ client interface was integrated with five different virtual agents, which allowed participants to select their preferred interaction partner (Torres et al 2019b).…”