Co-designing an Embodied e-Coach With Older Adults: The Tangible Coach Journey

This article describes a tangible interface for an e-coach, co-designed in four countries to meet older adults’ needs and expectations. The aim of this device is to coach the user by giving recommendations, personalized tasks and to build empathy through vocal, visual, and physical interaction. Through our co-design process, we collected insights that helped identifying requirements for the physical design, the interaction design and the privacy and data control. In the first phase, we collected users’ needs and expectations through several workshops. Requirements were then transformed into three design concepts that were rated and commented by our target users. The final design was implemented and tested in three countries. We discussed the results and the open challenges for the design of physical e-coaches for older adults. To encourage further developments in this field, we released the research outputs of this design process in an open-source repository

The NESTORE e-Coach: Designing a Multi-Domain Pathway to Well-Being in Older Age

This article describes the coaching strategies of the NESTORE e-coach, a virtual coach for promoting healthier lifestyles in older age. The novelty of the NESTORE project is the definition of a multi-domain personalized pathway where the e-coach accompanies the user throughout different structured and non-structured coaching activities and recommendations. The article also presents the design process of the coaching strategies, carried out including older adults from four European countries and experts from the different health domains, and the results of the tests carried out with 60 older adults in Italy, Spain and The Netherlands

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NESTORE ::un compagnon multimodal pour les séniors

Dans le cadre du projet Européen NESTORE, nous envisageons de créer un coach virtuel pour le bien-être des seniors. Ce dernier est un agent conversationnel qui peut avoir une conversation utilisant le langage naturel avec l'utilisateur afin de coacher, de se lier d'amitié et d'accompagner les seniors tout au long de leur parcours. Cet agent conversationnel se décline sous différentes formes d'interfaces telles qu’une application de messagerie textuelle ou un assistant vocal intégré. Cet agent conversationnel multimodal cherche à construire une relation empathique avec les utilisateurs basée sur son omniprésence, son attitude de coaching, sa fidélité et enfin sa capacité de comprendre l'émotion de l'utilisateur. Dans cet article, nous présentons la conception de ce coach virtuel, son but, ses rôles, l’architecture du système, ses capacités et ses multiinterfaces

NESTORE ::an embodied tangible conversational agent for older adults

Older adults are increasing in Europe [2]. Technology may play a role in older adults' health. Giving technology the ability to be physically manipulated can result in creating trust [4]. According to Spreicer [8], co-designing tangible user interface with elderly people can increase the chance of technology acceptance. NESTORE [6] is a virtual coach that comes in different forms of modalities/interfaces: a chatbot, a mobile application and a tangible coach. This article focuses on presenting one of the interfaces of NESTORE: the “tangible coach”. The tangible coach is an embodied conversational agent that seeks to empower older adults in becoming the co-producers of their wellbeing lifestyle through its tangible and its vocal interaction

Workshop on Tangible xAI

The goal of this workshop is to discuss the potential benefits and the open challenges of giving a physical form to Artificial Intelligence (AI), towards the definition of tangible, or graspable AI. In the workshop we will focus on the use-case of a convolutional Neural Network for image analysis and we will carry out a hands-on paper prototyping activity to imagine tangible interactive AI-powered systems where critical parameters of the Neural Network are physicalized. Such systems have the potential to lower the barrier for AI education and for making AI systems more trustable and explainabl

Older adults' perspectives on multimodal interaction with a conversational virtual coach

The use of multiple interfaces may improve the perception of a stronger relationship between a conversational virtual coach and older adults. The purpose of this paper is to show the effect of output combinations [single-interface (chatbot, tangible coach), multi-interface (assignment, redundant-complementary)] of two distinct conversational agent interfaces (chatbot and tangible coach) on the eCoach-user relationship (closeness, commitment, complementarity) and the older adults' feeling of social presence of the eCoach. Our study was conducted with two different study settings: an online web survey and a face to face experiment. Our online study with 59 seniors shows that the output modes in multi-interface redundant-complementary manner significantly improves the eCoach-user relationship and social presence of the eCoach compared to only using single-interfaces outputs. Whereas in our face to face experiment with 15 seniors, significant results were found only in terms of higher social presence of multi-interface redundant complementary manner compared to chatbot only. We also investigated the effect of each study design on our results, using both quantitative and qualitative methods

Multimodal conversational agent for older adults' behavioral change

Recently, research in the multimodal interaction area has shown a rapid development and users have been embracing their experience of multimodal technologies. In fact, having a multimodal system means allowing the user to choose one or more communication channel to access the system. While, on the contrary, unimodal systems do not have this option and can only settle to one-way of communication. Particularly, conversational agents are also in rapid increment and older adults are becoming more and more exposed to such agents. NESTORE is a virtual coach that aims to follow older adults in their wellbeing journey. It comes in two forms of interfaces: (i) a chatbot which is a text-based messaging application and (ii) a tangible coach which is a vocal assistant. This virtual coach is multimodal, due to the fact that it can depict or send information and even receive the user’s input through two different interfaces which are the chatbot and the tangible coach. Our aim is then to explore the modality that the user prefers in terms of user experience. We experimented with older adults five different types of scenarios where the virtual coach was interacting with a user through different modalities, used individually or combined. The virtual coach was asking a set of questions derived from a behavioral change model called HAPA. We measured the perceived user experience for each scenario with the UEQ-S questionnaire, and asked to rank the scenarios according to the users’ preferences

Empathy scale adaptation for artificial agents ::a review with a new subscale proposal

The communication between humans and artificial agents is becoming crucial and significant in daily life, especially with the advancements in the fields of human-robot and human-computer interaction. For these artificial agents to be recognized as social beings, they should exhibit emotional and empathic behaviors. However, there is no global agreement on measuring the empathic capabilities of these agents. For this reason, the scientific community has paid a significant focus on developing a standardized metric to perceive artificial agents’empathy. In this regard, this article provides a discussion on challenges in artificial empathy evaluation and researches the developments to discuss the factors and recommendations to design a globally accepted metric. It also discusses the qualities required for a globally accepted and standardized metric. Finally, an adaptation to an existing questionnaire is proposed for the evaluation of empathy in artificial agents

Understanding older adults’ affect states in daily life for promoting self-reflection about mental wellbeing

In recent years, due to the rise in availability of unstructured big data and technological affordances, there has been a proverbial “explosion” of research within the field of sentiment analysis and affective computing, facilitating the study of in-situ communicated emotion and its accurate detection at an unprecedented scale. Increasingly the emotional dimension and its key important role is being recognized in e-coaching, with attempts at its integration within such systems. This chapter reviews the predominant extant models for representing affect, as well as emotion related states relevant to older persons’ experiences, including the state-of-art for their automated detection and integration within e-coaching systems. Given the approaches available, we describe how the NESTORE system addresses emotion recognition, self-tracking and subsequent feedback intended to help older adults make sense of their affective experiences across their daily life, as well as the role it can play in holistic e-coaching systems. Finally, from the NESTORE experience, we draw recommendations about how future e-coaching system could be implemented in the future to include the emotional dimension