This chapter describes the vision of the EMPATHIC project of social challenges and innovation opportunities to support elderly independency and well- being. Asanintroduction,wefirstidentifythemainchallengesthatresultfromthe current demographic status in Europe. Then, we show the vision and approach pro- posed by the EMPATHIC project to deal with some of these challenges. Next sec- tion develops the main concepts, goals and outcomes of the EMPATHIC project. The following section reports the impact of the project and the final section de- scribes the exploitation of the results as well as the concluding remarksThe research leading to the results in this paper has been conducted in the project EMPATHIC (Grant N: 769872) that received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme

Chollet, Gérard

Cordasco, Gennaro

Esposito, Anna

Fernández Ruanova, Begoña

González Fraile, Eduardo

Korsnes, Maria S.

Tenorio Laranga, Joffre

Torres Barañano, María Inés

English

Archivo Digital para la Docencia y la Investigación

1. Ageing in the 21st century in Europe: social challenges and innovation opportunities to support elderly independency and wellbeing. M. Inés Torres1*, J. Tenorio2, G. Cordasco3, E. González-Fraile2, A. Esposito3, M. S. Kornes4,  G. Chollet5, B. Fernández-Ruinova2,  1 Universidad del País Vasco UPV/EHU, Leioa, Spain 2  Osatek/Osakidetza, Bilbao, Spain 3  Università degli Studi della Camapania Luigi Vinvitelli, Caserta, Italy 4 Department of Old Age Psychiatry, Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway 5 Intelligent Voice, London, United Kingdom Abstract   This chapter describes the vision of the EMPATHIC project of social challenges and innovation opportunities to support elderly independency and well-being.  As an introduction, we first identify the main challenges that result from the current demographic status in Europe. Then, we show the vision and approach pro-posed by the EMPATHIC project to deal with some of these challenges. Next sec-tion develops the main concepts, goals and outcomes of the EMPATHIC project. The following section reports the impact of the project and the final section de-scribes the exploitation of the results as well as the concluding remarks 1.1 Challenges of the 21st century demography as an introductory context. Population ageing is one of the social challenges of the 21st century that directly concerns Europe as well as other developed communities. The decline of the fertil-ity rates along with the increase in life duration result in a fast raise of the percentage of the population above 65. In Europe, this percentage is expected to growth from 16% in 2010 to 29% in 20601. Moreover, this population segment expected to be predominantly female and includes a growing number of elder persons above 80. In this context, social challenges to be addressed are, among others:                                                          * corresponding author: Prof. M. Inés Torres, Universidad del País Vasco UPV/EHU, Bilbao, Spain, manes.torres@ehu.eus 1 Ageing Populations in Europe: Challenges and Opportunities for the CEB (Council of Europe development Bank), 2014 https://coebank.org/media/documents/Study_Ageing.pdf  2  • A high demand of infrastructures and services targeting the elderly needs and wishes. In particular, the extended preference of ageing at home has to be fulfilled while taking into consideration specific cultural facts as well as the di-versity of societies.  • A cross-cutting approach covering different sectors such as health, hou-sing, low-income persons and adequate living conditions in cities and rural areas. • Support healthy older people to remain productive and have an indepen-dent life in their community as long as possible. To this end, a wide range pro-ducts and services need to be conceived to assist a certain standard of living and wellbeing as people age. Furthermore, technology is in the core of most of no-wadays innovative products and services.   Currently there is a huge demand for autonomous systems able to assist people on several needs in their aging. Provisions of support have been made either through the monitoring and detection of changes in the physical, and/or cognitive, and/or social daily functional activities, as well as in offering therapeutic interventions (Cordasco et al. 2014). These systems have targeted vulnerable elder people who face complex and stressed interactional exchanges. In this context, strong emotional behaviors arouse, having as consequences discomforts, loss of control, anxiety, stress, depression, misplaced conducts. These behaviors are furtherly affected by several factors including personality, individual traits, social and cultural infor-mation (Esposito et al. 2016, Esposito et al. 2015, Troncone et al. 2014). Having an EMPATHIC coach for facing such daily facets would be desired. To do so there is a need to develop “experimental and theoretical models of behaviors for implement-ing computational paradigms that should produce ICT interfaces equipped with a human level of automaton intelligence” (Esposito et al. 2015, p. 48). Their design has to take into account the user involvement and interests. Users must judge the developed technology acceptable and useful in their context of use. Text, voices, or nonverbal communication must be appropriately exploited to generate feedback messages but also capture user’s acceptance and trustworthiness.  1.2 Vision of the EMPATHIC project. As a consequence of the previous context, there is a need to follow a novel user centered approach focused on making the interaction personalized to the prospec-tive users, accounting of their age, gender, culture, preferences, personality, role, occupation, and responses to the system’s strategies. The interactions and feedback messages must be tailored to the knowledge the system has about that specific user at that specific interactional instant, with system’s reactions attuned by the knowledge gained during previous interactional turns, and the whole history of us-ers-device interactions.  The EMPATHIC Research and Innovation project researches, innovates and val-idates new paradigms, laying the foundation for future generations of Personalised 3 Virtual Coaches to help elderly people to live independently. The wellness coaching advice promotes healthy habits and behaviors, by challenging each user to transform their personal goals and needs into actions. The EMPATHIC Virtual Coach engages the healthy-senior user to take care of potential chronic diseases, maintain a healthy diet, have adequate physical activity as well as encourage social engagement, thus contributing to the older adults’ ability to maintain a satisfying and independent lifestyle. The EMPATHIC Agent motivates the user through a friendly virtual coach to reach pre-set benefits, whose achievement are measured through project-defined metrics. Our ambition was to create a personal, friendly and familiar environment for the users, avoiding the threatening effects of unfamiliar new gadgets or an ex-cessive focus on medical supervision. The project looks beyond the basic medical and physical needs of a person, to the link between body and emotional well-being. The EMPATHIC Agent is designed to be capable of perceiving the emotional and social state of a person, in the learned context of the senior users’ expectations and requirements, and their personal history, and responds adaptively to his/her needs.  1.3 Main concepts and outcomes of EMPATHIC project. The EMPATHIC project implements the concept of coaching through a virtual conversation agent. Nevertheless, the aspiration is not to conceive and put into prac-tice a coach who provides personalized nutritional advice or recommendations for physical and social activities adapted to the particular conditions of the user. In con-trast, the project proposes coaching strategies aimed to get behavioral changes on the user. Coaching dialogs are logical structures based on question-answer model with the objective to understand needs, restrictions and goals of the user (Montene-gro et al. 2019, Justo et al. 2020a). The goals need to be accepted by the user. There-fore, coaching dialogs will promote the user’s self-awareness and guide the user through realistic and healthy goals. Each dialog follows a sequential structure based on the GROW (Goal, Reality, Options and will of action plan) which was proposed by professionals of health coaching. In this framework, EMPATHIC project a) Provides automatic personalised ad-vice guidance (through the coach) having a direct impact in empowering elder users into a wide of advanced ICT keeping improving their quality of life and level their independent independency living status of the people as the age (Tenorio-Laranga et al. 2019); b) Identifies non-intrusive technologies to detect the individual’s emo-tional and health status. of the person through non-intrusive technologies (Esposito at al. 2020); c) Implements health-coach goals and actions through an intelligent computational system, intelligent coach and spoken dialogue system (Torres et al. 2020) adapted to users’ intentions (Montenegro et al., 2019), emotions and context d) Provide the virtual coach with a natural, empathic, personalised and expressive communication model (Esposito et al. 2019, Montenegro et al., 2019,  Torres et al., 2019).  4  In addition the main technological goals carried out are: a) the development of a simulated virtual coach allowing to develop coaching conversations between pro-fessionals and end-users, which enables the project to acquire a corpus of dialogues as well as engage the end-users on the design decisions as well as evaluate the pro-gress b) the integration a proof-of-concept of the technology running on different devices and c) the validation through field trials performed in three different coun-tries (Spain, Norway and France) with three distinct languages and cultures (plus English for research and development) of the proposed methods, approaches and solutions.  1.4 Expected impact of EMPATHIC project. Nowadays, at the beginning of the 21st century, most elderly people may expe-rience barriers to access to some philological or coaching-based interventions. Those barriers are related to mobility, accessibility, economical or even lack of awareness. Those type of interventions may be especially relevant for those suffer-ing a decrease of their well-being (e.g. suffering social isolation, sadness, depres-sion or anxiety).  The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is becoming a cost-effective way to overcome those barriers mentioned above. Moreover, ICTs enable in an accessible and scalable way the promotion of health, prevention, active aging and even early diagnose.  Thus, ICT based therapies can reach thousands or millions of people simultaneously.  Speaking about ICT based therapies and important concept raises. Low intensity interventions refer to brief therapies, group treatments, self-help approaches, such as bibliotherapy and computerized treatments. Low intensity interventions represent a new paradigm in evidence-based practice and the delivery of health and well-being services to promote healthy habits and to increase access (availability, utili-zation and equity) to them. In that sense, EMPATHIC project, is a clear example of low intensity intervention promising and providing impact as described below:  • New model of psychological/health care that limits specialist time or used this time in a highly cost-effective manner. • The development of new services which can be more efficient as well as effective. • Key element in a stepped and collaborative care model. The low intensity intervention represents and initial step before refereeing to a human pro-fessional.  • New ways of working and new workforces that provide more rapid and flexible access to early intervention and preventive programs. People can access to short weekly sessions of about 10-20 minutes, depending on per-sons time availability. 5 • New ways of training new and skills. • New ways of assessment, monitoring and evaluation of variables and key elements related with well-being and health. • New ways of increase adherence and engagement to e-coach through more attractive, relevant and interesting. • New communication tool with our target population to deliver coaching. • New ways to disseminate services in a massive scale to sparse populations located in remote communities. E.g. providing recommendations based on personal desires, needs or interest.  • Intervening in a way that the patients’ choices are respected (anonimity, time slots….) • Tailored intervention with best matching between program contents and idiosyncratic patient’s needs.  In conclusion, Low intensity can be a great solution to a stepped support service model where the intensity of the coaching can be adjusted depending on the situa-tion. The elderly population is highly heterogeneous and they may need from dif-ferent types of solutions. E.g. professional support, activities recommendations, awareness of the local offer etc. 1.6 Exploitation of the results and concluding remarks We are living in a longevity revolution. The numbers are clear, the 20% of the population in western countries is over 65 years and this percentage is growing. However, the old age does not depend on the age but with the dependency. Even though, senior population is highly heterogeneous, there is a main profile of active person, consumer and committed with the community. We are speaking about re-tired people with a lot of active years to enjoy. People that expects quality of life, contribute to the community and postpone the old age.   Considering this reality, there is a need to accommodate current products and services to this new demography (Fernandez Ruanova et al, 2019). In other words, adapt the current market to the senior qualities (not necessarily create new offer). Therefore, there are a lot of efforts, from different entities, to centralize and “silver-ize” the current offer.  Regarding active aging, especially relevant the offer related to culture, leisure, physical activity and healthy nutrition. This offer, can be (and will be soon) centralized and adapted through different platforms age friendly. Most probably, through public-private collaborations. Those initiatives will open new spaces for virtual advisors and coaches. This type of solutions are a very suitable environment to integrate and exploit a virtual coach such EMPATHIC. We are speaking about a virtual coach capable to understand (in an automatized way) the needs of each user (as a unique individual). 6  In that sense, EMPATHIC is trained to understand needs related 4 main areas: Lei-sure and culture, social relations, physical activity and nutrition. Those areas are key for a suitable active aging. Moreover, EMPATHIC is engaging and motivating the users to take actions.  Therefore, connecting EMPATHIC with the local offer, especially the silver of-fer, provides a huge potential for both public and private entities. First, it can pro-vide a real sensor of the senior needs and desires from a specific area. Second, con-nects the local offer with the seniors’ interests. The local offer can be public or private, but the strengths relies on the personal suggestions linked with the local offer. Imagine somebody that feels a bit blue and through EMPATHIC ends up buying a ticket for the local theatre.  On that scenario, the exploitation model relies on both the public and the private sector. The public contribution would help the implementation and an initial mainte-nance. The expected source would be local entities which aim to both provide re-sponse to the demographic challenge and stimulate the local economy. After the implementation and the market penetration, the maintenance would come from the private offer, as a percentage of the sales coming from an EMPATHIC recommen-dation.   Acknowledgements The research leading to the results in this paper has been conducted in the project EMPATHIC (Grant N: 769872) that received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. References 1. Cordasco, G., Esposito, M., Masucci, F., Riviello, M.T., Esposito, A., Chollet, G., Schlögl, S., Milhorat, P., & Pelosi, G. (2014) Assessing voice user interfaces: the assist system prototype. In: Proceedings of 5th IEEE international Conference on Cognitive Info Communications, Vietri sul Mare, 5–7 Nov, pp. 91–96 2. Esposito A., Esposito, A. M., LikformanSulem,L., Maldonato, M. N., & Vinciarelli, A. (2016). On the Significance of Speech Pauses in Depressive Disorders: Results on Read and Spontaneous Narratives. In Esposito A. et al. (Eds), Springer SIST series on Recent Advances in Nonlinear Speech Processing, 48, 73-82. 3. Esposito, A., Esposito, A. M., & Vogel, C. (2015). Needs and challenges in human computer interaction for processing social emotional information. Pattern Recognition Letters, 66, 41–51 4. Troncone, A., Palumbo, D., & Esposito, A. (2014). Mood Effects on the Decoding of Emotional Voices. In S.Bassis, A. Esposito, & F. C. Morabito (Eds.), Recent Advances 7 of Neural Network Models and Applications (Vol. 26, pp. 325–332). Springer Interna-tional Publishing 5. Montenegro, C.,  López Zorrilla, A., Olaso, J.M.,  Santana, R., Justo, R., Lozano, J.A. and Torres, M.I. (2019). A Dialogue-Act Taxonomy for a Virtual Coach Designed to Improve the Life of Elderly. In: Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, Vol. 3, No .3, pp 1-19  6. Justo, R., Ben Letaifa, L., Palmero, C., Gonzalez-Fraile, E., Torp Johansen, A., Vázquez, A., Cordasco, G., Schlögl, S.,  Fernandez Ruanova, B.,  Rodrigues da Silva, M.,  Escalera, S., deVelasco, M., Tenorio-Laranga,  T., Esposito, A., Kornes, M. and Torres, M.I. (2020a) Analysis of the Interaction between Elderly People and a Simulated Virtual Coach. In:  Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, Vol 11, N 12 pp 6125-6140 7. Tenorio-Laranga, J.,  Fernandez Ruanova, B., Torres, .M.I., Justo; R., Alday, A. and Llano Hernaiz, J.X. (2019)  Designing a virtual coach: Involvement of end-users from early design to prototype. In: International Journal of Integrated Care (IJIC). 2019 An-nual Conference Supplement, Vol. 19 Issue S1, pp. 1-8 8. Esposito, A., Amorese, T.,  Maldonato, N.,  Vinciarelli, A., Torres, M.I., Escalera, S. and Cordasco, G.  (2020) Seniors’ ability to decode differently aged facial emotional expressions In: Faces and Gestures in E-health and Welfare (FaGEW), 15th IEEE In-ternational Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, Buenos Aires 9. Esposito, A., Amorese, T., Cuciniello, M.,  Esposito, A.M., Troncone, A.,  Torres, M.I., Schlögl, A. and Cordasco, G. (2019) Seniors’ acceptance of virtual humanoid agents. In: Ambient Assisted Living. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering vol 544, pp 429-443. 10. Torres,  M.I., Olaso,  J.M., Glackin, C. , Justo, R. and Chollet, G. (2020) An Spoken Dialog System for the Empathic Virtual Coach. In: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engi-neering, vol 579, pp 259-265 11. Torres, M.I., Olaso, J.M., Montenegro, C., Santana,R., Vázquez, A., Justo, R., . Lozano, J.A., Schlögl, S., Chollet, G., Dugan, N.,  Irvine, M., Glackin, N., Pickard,  C., Esposito, A., Cordasco, G., Troncone, A.,  Petrovska-Delacretaz, D., Mtibaa, A.,  Hmani, M.A., Korsnes, M. S., Martinussen, J.L., Escalera, S., Palmero Cantariño, C., Deroo, O., Gor-deeva, O., Tenorio-Laranga, J., Gonzalez-Fraile, J.E., Fernandez-Ruanova, B. and Gon-zalez-Pinto, A. (2019). The EMPATHIC Project: Mid-term Achievements. In: Proceed-ings of COACH Workshop: Personalized Coaching for the Wellbeing of an Ageing Society @ PETRA PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference, pp 629-638  ACM digital library. 12. Fernandez Ruanova, B.,  Tenorio-Laranga, J., Alday; A., Llano Hernaiz , J.X., Justo, R. and  Torres, M.I. (2019). “Innovation on home-based care services” In: International Journal of Integrated Care (IJIC), 2019 Annual Conference Supplement, Vol. 19 Issue S1, A22 pp. 1-8,  

Ageing in the 21st century in Europe: social challenges and innovation opportunities to support elderly independency and wellbeing.

http://addi.ehu.es/bitstream/10810/50944/1/EMPATHIC_book_Chapter.pdf

Ageing in the 21st century in Europe: social challenges and innovation opportunities to support elderly independency and wellbeing.

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Archivo Digital para la Docencia y la Investigación