EMPATHIC, Expressive, Advanced Virtual Coach to Improve Independent Healthy-Life-Years of the Elderdy

The EMPATHIC Research & Innovation project researchs, innovates, explores and validates 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. The project uses remote non-intrusive technologies to extract physiological markers of emotional states in real-time for online adaptive responses of the coach, and advances holistic modelling of behavioural, computational, physical and social aspects of a personalised expressive virtual coach. It develops 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. EMPATHIC proposes multidisciplinary research and development, involving: • Geriatrician, Neuroscientist, Psychiatric, health and social work specialists, knowledgeable in age related conditions and the aims of a coaching program in maintaining independence, functional capacity, and monitoring physical, cognitive, mental and social wellbeing to implement the individual coaching goals • Psychologist, Neuroscientist and Computer Science experts for detection and identification of the emotional status of the user • Engineers and Computer Scientists in speech and language technologies, biometrics, image analysis, and machine learning. They will develop tools to detect emotional cues, model users' emotional status, translate coaching plans into actions, user-adapt spoken dialogue and personalise talking agents • Telecare services, a senior association and a hospital interested in testing and validating EMPATHIC • Companies interested in providing and developing technology for the project and commercialising the products and derived services 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.