The EMPATHIC Project: Building an Expressive, Advanced Virtual Coach to Improve Independent Healthy-Life-Years of the Elderly

Luisa Brinkschulte; Natascha Mariacher; Stephan Schlögl; María Inés Torres; Raquel Justo; Javier Mikel Olaso; Anna Esposito; Gennaro Cordasco; Gérard Chollet; Cornelius Glackin; Colin Pickard; Dijana Petrovska-Delacretaz; Mohamed Amine Hmani; Ayment Mtibaa; Anaïs Fernandez; Daria Kyslitska; Begoña Fernandez-Ruanova; Jofre Tenorio-Laranga; Mari Aksnes; Maria Stylianou Korsnes; Miriam Reiner; Fredrik Lindner; Olivier Deroo; Olga Gordeeva

arXiv · 2104.13836

The EMPATHIC Project: Building an Expressive, Advanced Virtual Coach to Improve Independent Healthy-Life-Years of the Elderly

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Abstract

This paper outlines the EMPATHIC Research & Innovation project, which aims to research, innovate, explore and validate new interaction paradigms and plat-forms for future generations of Personalized Virtual Coaches to assist elderly people living independently at and around their home. Innovative multimodal face analytics, adaptive spoken dialogue systems, and natural language inter-faces are part of what the project investigates and innovates, aiming to help dependent aging persons and their carers. It will uses remote, non-intrusive technologies to extract physiological markers of emotional states and adapt respective coach responses. In doing so, it aims to develop causal models for emotionally believable coach-user interactions, which shall engage elders and thus keep off loneliness, sustain health, enhance quality of life, and simplify access to future telecare services. Through measurable end-user validations performed in Spain, Norway and France (and complementary user evaluations in Italy), the proposed methods and solutions will have to demonstrate useful-ness, reliability, flexibility and robustness.

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Luisa Brinkschulte, Natascha Mariacher, Stephan Schlögl, María Inés Torres, Raquel Justo, Javier Mikel Olaso, Anna Esposito, Gennaro Cordasco, Gérard Chollet, Cornelius Glackin, Colin Pickard, Dijana Petrovska-Delacretaz, Mohamed Amine Hmani, Ayment Mtibaa, Anaïs Fernandez, Daria Kyslitska, Begoña Fernandez-Ruanova, Jofre Tenorio-Laranga, Mari Aksnes, Maria Stylianou Korsnes, Miriam Reiner, Fredrik Lindner, Olivier Deroo, Olga Gordeeva. 2021-04-28. The EMPATHIC Project: Building an Expressive, Advanced Virtual Coach to Improve Independent Healthy-Life-Years of the Elderly. https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.13836

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