A cross-cultural survey to identify Seniors' preferences towards the Empathic Virtual Coach

The present investigation is part of the EMPATHIC project aiming at develop an Empathic Virtual Coach (VC) able to promote seniors' healthy lifestyle and independent aging. To this end, it is fundamental to investigate users' preferences towards the implemented automatic system refined on the basis of users' preferences derived from previous field trials with Wizard of Oz (WoZ) experimental sessions. Data collection has been carried out involving three different countries (France, Norway and Spain) and a total of 71 volunteers was enrolled in the planned field trials. Five Virtual Agents (VAs) named Natalie, Alice, Lena, Christian and Adam were purposely designed and users' preferences were assessed using the shortened version of the Virtual Agent Acceptance Questionnaire (VAAQ). This specific tool, developed by members of the EMPATHIC project, includes 7 different sections, and the present work aims to disseminate results of four of the seven sections administered to participants, devoted at assessing respectively: users' willingness to interact (section II); pragmatic, hedonic (Identity and Feeling) and attractiveness qualities (section III); the type of task participants entrusted to the proposed agents among healthcare, housework, protection/security, and front office jobs (section V) and agents voice' quality (section VI). Results reveal seniors' appreciation of agents' pleasantness, originality, voice' quality and ability to engage users in a long lasting interaction with them

Other Advanced Research Initiatives in Elderly Care and Fragility Prevention

Based on the lessons learnt from the co-design, development and integration processes, the research findings and the outputs from the engagement with a network of stakeholders over the course of the EU funded initiatives, this chapter will aim to help sketching the future policies and research funding programmes for ageing well in Europe. The chapter presents the visions and the perspectives of the running projects in the frame of the H2020 Personalized Medicine-15 call

The EMPATHIC Virtual Coach: A demo

The main objective of the EMPATHIC project has been the design and development of a virtual coach to engage the healthy-senior user and to enhance well-being through awareness of personal status. The EMPATHIC approach addresses this objective through multimodal interactions supported by the GROW coaching model. The paper summarizes the main components of the EMPATHIC Virtual Coach (EMPATHIC-VC) and introduces a demonstration of the coaching sessions in selected scenarios

The Empathic project: Mid-term Achievements

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.European Commissio