EU-Japanese Virtual Coach
for Smart Ageing
Smart Living Support for the Ageing Society
EU Funded Project e-ViTA
Project Justification
With advancing age, certain tasks become increasingly challenging. This includes managing daily activities as well as taking care of one’s physical and mental health. Particularly when living alone, the idea of facing such challenges can be perceived as extremely uncomfortable. Against this background, the use of smart, virtual technologies holds out the prospect to improve the safety and well-being of older people. This project aims to build a virtual coach which detects different emotional states such as sadness or pain in order to provide appropriate help or to adapt its dialogue system.
Overview of the intelligent devices (left), exemplary use of the robot NAO (middle) and possible androids (right) to be investigated within the framework of the project
Our Approach
e-VITA is a joint European–Japanese cooperation project for smart ageing with funding by the European Union as well as the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication (MIC). Within the project, a virtual coach is developed with the goal to empower older adults to improve the management of their health as well as daily activities.
e-VITA socio-technical approach of participatory design and stakeholder engagement deployed via real-life Living Labs inspired by the everyday practices of older adults
Work Packages, Insights and Outcomes
Ixp takes lead in the analysis of the end-user, content, technical, and ethical requirements and the compilation of information about behavioral, physiological, and psychological parameters related to emotional and stress conditions, well-being, health status, and mental and cognitive functions. Furthermore, to enable appropriate and customized emotional as well as social interactions with the coach, computer audition and vision algorithms will be developed based on the collection of relevant data corpora and subsequent advanced audio-video analyses. The state of the art on how to measure and proces psycho-behavioral parameters will be extended by new emotional and social computing approaches, for instance to analyze raw signals in various abstraction levels.
Overview of the european and japanes project partners
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