Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EMPATHIC (Empathic, Expressive, Advanced Virtual Coach to Improve Independent Healthy-Life-Years of the Elderly)
Reporting period: 2019-05-01 to 2021-04-30
Social Challenges of Aging: Technology at the Service of People.
The EMPATHIC project contributes to respond to one of the main social challenges that demographic change poses on European society: maintaining the health, well-being and independent life of people as they age.
Longevity has been explained by attributing 75% to socio-behavioural conditions and 25% to genetic factors. From this assumption, the range of variability introduced by environmental factors is very broad and would explain, in part, the different ways of aging: from an active and positive aging to an aging with illness and dependence. In this context, the European Commission (EC) promotes technology and innovation, with particular emphasis on challenges related to aging. Furthermore, Information and communication technologies (ICT) play an important role in improving the quality of life, being able to enhance autonomy and independence and enabling the group of elders to remain active, both in the workplace and in the community.
EMPATHIC proposal is based on a conceptual and ethical framework focused on the people rights and responsibilities, which is based on principles established by the United Nations: a) Dignity, which includes privacy, informed consent, autonomy, obtrusiveness and equal access; b) Autonomy, which requires respect for self-determination of people including recognition of the heterogeneity of people and respect to their preferences; c) Participation, established as one of the pillars of active aging, together with health and safety, according to the World Health Organisation.
EMAPTHIC overall Objectives:
- Design a virtual coach (EMPATHIC-VC), to engage the healthy-senior user to enhance wellbeing through awareness of personal physical status, by improving diet and nutritional habits, by developing more physical exercise and by social activity
- Involve end-users and to reach a degree of fit to their personalised needs and requirements, derived by the coach, which will enhance their well-being
- Supply the coach with Incorporate non-intrusive, privacy-preserving, empathic, expressive interaction technologies.
- Validate the coach efficiency and effectiveness across 3 distinct European societies (Norway, Spain, and France), with 200 to 250 subjects – who will be involved from the start
- Evaluate/validate the effectiveness of EMPATHIC designs against relevant user’s personalised acceptance and affordance criteria.
- Drive the developed methodology and tools to industry acceptance and open-source access in the software engineering process of implementing socially-centred ICT products.
The EMPATHIC project contributes to respond to one of the main social challenges that demographic change poses on European society: maintaining the health, well-being and independent life of people as they age.
Longevity has been explained by attributing 75% to socio-behavioural conditions and 25% to genetic factors. From this assumption, the range of variability introduced by environmental factors is very broad and would explain, in part, the different ways of aging: from an active and positive aging to an aging with illness and dependence. In this context, the European Commission (EC) promotes technology and innovation, with particular emphasis on challenges related to aging. Furthermore, Information and communication technologies (ICT) play an important role in improving the quality of life, being able to enhance autonomy and independence and enabling the group of elders to remain active, both in the workplace and in the community.
EMPATHIC proposal is based on a conceptual and ethical framework focused on the people rights and responsibilities, which is based on principles established by the United Nations: a) Dignity, which includes privacy, informed consent, autonomy, obtrusiveness and equal access; b) Autonomy, which requires respect for self-determination of people including recognition of the heterogeneity of people and respect to their preferences; c) Participation, established as one of the pillars of active aging, together with health and safety, according to the World Health Organisation.
EMAPTHIC overall Objectives:
- Design a virtual coach (EMPATHIC-VC), to engage the healthy-senior user to enhance wellbeing through awareness of personal physical status, by improving diet and nutritional habits, by developing more physical exercise and by social activity
- Involve end-users and to reach a degree of fit to their personalised needs and requirements, derived by the coach, which will enhance their well-being
- Supply the coach with Incorporate non-intrusive, privacy-preserving, empathic, expressive interaction technologies.
- Validate the coach efficiency and effectiveness across 3 distinct European societies (Norway, Spain, and France), with 200 to 250 subjects – who will be involved from the start
- Evaluate/validate the effectiveness of EMPATHIC designs against relevant user’s personalised acceptance and affordance criteria.
- Drive the developed methodology and tools to industry acceptance and open-source access in the software engineering process of implementing socially-centred ICT products.
Main results achieved at the end of the project.
1. Provide automatic personalised advice guidance (through the coach) having a direct impact in level their independent living status of the people as the age:
-Identification and assessment of main cues related to physical, cognitive, mental and social well-being.
-Definition of personalised, psychologically motivated and acceptable coach plans and strategies.
-Translation of professional coach behaviour into actions of the Intelligent EMPATHIC-VC.
2. Identification of non-intrusive technologies to detect the individual’s emotional status.
3. Involve end-users to reach a degree of fit to their needs and requirements
- End-user included in the design and development during the full duration of the project
- Interaction with the Woz, the WoZ+, the bot, the prototype while filling questionnaires including usability tests in all the experiments carried out.
- Final discussion groups
4. Implement health-coach goals and actions through an intelligent computational and the virtual coach with a natural, empathic, personalised and expressive communication model.
- Machine learning for transcribing and understanding the user in three languages.
- Data-driven technologies to model individual user profile and his current status.
- Technologies to develop the coach strategies that support each decision of the EMPATHIC-VC
- Technologies to generate the appropriate sentence, inflected Voices and gestures of the EMPATHIC-VC.
5. A proof-of-concept of the technologies running on different devices already integrated and provided
- An updated WoZ platform running for two scenarios and three languages.
- A full automatic EMPATHIC-VC prototype integrating all the previous technologies.
- A bot working on Telegram and a Voice-based integrated in four languages.
6. Validation and Evaluation
- Validated the coach efficiency and effectiveness across distinct European societies (Norway, Spain, and France), with 278 different end-users
- Evaluated the effectiveness of EMPATHIC designs through relevant Key Performance Indicators
7. Dissemination and exploitation
- A large set of dissemination actions targeting different audiences
- A corpus of video recordings of human machine interaction, labelled and three sets of questionnaires to be distributed through ELRA.
- Technological transfer framework for the EMPATHIC-VC, the WoZ and the bot.
1. Provide automatic personalised advice guidance (through the coach) having a direct impact in level their independent living status of the people as the age:
-Identification and assessment of main cues related to physical, cognitive, mental and social well-being.
-Definition of personalised, psychologically motivated and acceptable coach plans and strategies.
-Translation of professional coach behaviour into actions of the Intelligent EMPATHIC-VC.
2. Identification of non-intrusive technologies to detect the individual’s emotional status.
3. Involve end-users to reach a degree of fit to their needs and requirements
- End-user included in the design and development during the full duration of the project
- Interaction with the Woz, the WoZ+, the bot, the prototype while filling questionnaires including usability tests in all the experiments carried out.
- Final discussion groups
4. Implement health-coach goals and actions through an intelligent computational and the virtual coach with a natural, empathic, personalised and expressive communication model.
- Machine learning for transcribing and understanding the user in three languages.
- Data-driven technologies to model individual user profile and his current status.
- Technologies to develop the coach strategies that support each decision of the EMPATHIC-VC
- Technologies to generate the appropriate sentence, inflected Voices and gestures of the EMPATHIC-VC.
5. A proof-of-concept of the technologies running on different devices already integrated and provided
- An updated WoZ platform running for two scenarios and three languages.
- A full automatic EMPATHIC-VC prototype integrating all the previous technologies.
- A bot working on Telegram and a Voice-based integrated in four languages.
6. Validation and Evaluation
- Validated the coach efficiency and effectiveness across distinct European societies (Norway, Spain, and France), with 278 different end-users
- Evaluated the effectiveness of EMPATHIC designs through relevant Key Performance Indicators
7. Dissemination and exploitation
- A large set of dissemination actions targeting different audiences
- A corpus of video recordings of human machine interaction, labelled and three sets of questionnaires to be distributed through ELRA.
- Technological transfer framework for the EMPATHIC-VC, the WoZ and the bot.
1.- Expected impacts in the Call:
1) Set of definedto evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of EMPATHIC-VC.
Success, effectiveness and usefulness of the EMPATHIC-VC have been validated in field-trials in three countries and evaluated through defined KPIs in quality of life for the coached elderly.
2) The validation process, which has guided the end-user validation, has been carried out considering the following dimensions: physical, usability, privacy, function, human interaction, self-concept, routine and sustainability.
3) End users have been involved and have driven the research and innovation at all stages of design and development.
4) Efforts aimed at improving the emotional and psychological well-being of seniors will reduce risk factors for depression and symptoms for those already suffering.
5) The project enhances European innovation capacity and the integration of new knowledge, by developing the software components as self-sustained, pre-packaged containers to enable standardized tooling for scaling and life-cycle management.
6) EMPATHIC contributes to independent living solutions and generates savings for the healthcare system, as the implementation of a real-time, socially situated, and emotionally adaptable ICT interface creates new services not only for healthcare, but also education, learning, computed-mediated activities etc.
7) EMPATHIC pays attention to the specific needs of females to fit their differing ratio in the elderly population. The consortium contributes to the visibility of women in technology and leadership.
2.- Further research, market and societal impacts
1) This project is of great relevance in promoting EU scientific competitiveness. It represents an international effort to bring together different competences.
2) Market and Industry Impact:
Virtual coaching and healthy ageing platform technologies and services
Autonomous smart agents or virtual personal assistants.
Human machine interaction in digital health, manufacturing, industrial, automated driver assistance, medical monitoring, self-care, banking, customer care, healthcare etc
The market of the Intelligent Virtual Agent increases annually due to greater investment in customer relationship management systems across all types of businesses.
3) Societal Impact.
EU research scientific community.
ICT-EU market
Entities delivering social services.
1) Set of definedto evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of EMPATHIC-VC.
Success, effectiveness and usefulness of the EMPATHIC-VC have been validated in field-trials in three countries and evaluated through defined KPIs in quality of life for the coached elderly.
2) The validation process, which has guided the end-user validation, has been carried out considering the following dimensions: physical, usability, privacy, function, human interaction, self-concept, routine and sustainability.
3) End users have been involved and have driven the research and innovation at all stages of design and development.
4) Efforts aimed at improving the emotional and psychological well-being of seniors will reduce risk factors for depression and symptoms for those already suffering.
5) The project enhances European innovation capacity and the integration of new knowledge, by developing the software components as self-sustained, pre-packaged containers to enable standardized tooling for scaling and life-cycle management.
6) EMPATHIC contributes to independent living solutions and generates savings for the healthcare system, as the implementation of a real-time, socially situated, and emotionally adaptable ICT interface creates new services not only for healthcare, but also education, learning, computed-mediated activities etc.
7) EMPATHIC pays attention to the specific needs of females to fit their differing ratio in the elderly population. The consortium contributes to the visibility of women in technology and leadership.
2.- Further research, market and societal impacts
1) This project is of great relevance in promoting EU scientific competitiveness. It represents an international effort to bring together different competences.
2) Market and Industry Impact:
Virtual coaching and healthy ageing platform technologies and services
Autonomous smart agents or virtual personal assistants.
Human machine interaction in digital health, manufacturing, industrial, automated driver assistance, medical monitoring, self-care, banking, customer care, healthcare etc
The market of the Intelligent Virtual Agent increases annually due to greater investment in customer relationship management systems across all types of businesses.
3) Societal Impact.
EU research scientific community.
ICT-EU market
Entities delivering social services.