Empathic, Expressive, Advanced Virtual Coach to Improve Independent Healthy-Life-Years of the Elderly

The EMPATHIC Research & Innovation project will research, innovate, explore and validate new paradigms and platforms, laying the foundation for future generations of Personalised Virtual Coaches to assist elderly people living independently at and around their home. Innovative multimodal face analytics, adaptive spoken dialogue systems and natural language interfaces are part of what the project will research and innovate, in order to help dependent aging persons and their carers. The project will use remote non-intrusive technologies to extract physiological markers of emotional states in real-time for online adaptive responses of the coach, and advance holistic modelling of behavioural, computational, physical and social aspects of a personalised expressive virtual coach. It will develop causal models of coach-user interactional exchanges that engage elders in emotionally believable interactions keeping off loneliness, sustaining health status, enhancing quality of life and simplifying access to future telecare services. The project will include a demonstration and validation phase with clearly-defined realistic use cases. It will focus on evidence-based, user-validated research and integration of intelligent user and context sensing methods through voice, eye and facial analysis, intelligent heuristics (complex interaction, user intention detection, distraction estimation, system decision), visual and spoken dialogue system, and system reaction capabilities. Through measurable end-user validation, to be performed in 3 different countries (Spain, Norway and France) with 3 distinct languages and cultures (plus English for R&D), the proposed methods and solutions will ensure usefulness, reliability, flexibility and robustness. The project partners include health-maintenance end-user organisations, technology developers, academic / research institutes and system integrators. The project, planned for a 36-month duration, is estimated to require total funding of 4 M€