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The EMPATHIC project: mid-term achievements

Published: 05 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

The goal of active aging is to promote changes in the elderly community so as to maintain an active, independent and socially-engaged lifestyle. Technological advancements currently provide the necessary tools to foster and monitor such processes. This paper reports on mid-term achievements of the European H2020 EMPATHIC project, which aims to research, innovate, explore and validate new interaction paradigms and platforms for future generations of personalized virtual coaches to assist the elderly and their carers to reach the active aging goal, in the vicinity of their home. The project focuses on evidence-based, user-validated research and integration of intelligent technology, and context sensing methods through automatic voice, eye and facial analysis, integrated with visual and spoken dialogue system capabilities. In this paper, we describe the current status of the system, with a special emphasis on its components and their integration, the creation of a Wizard of Oz platform, and findings gained from user interaction studies conducted throughout the first 18 months of the project.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
PETRA '19: Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments
June 2019
655 pages
ISBN:9781450362320
DOI:10.1145/3316782
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 05 June 2019

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Author Tags

  1. assisted living
  2. coaching
  3. emotional artificial agents
  4. spoken dialogue systems

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  • European Union

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PETRA '19

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  • (2023)Dialogue Management and Language Generation for a Robust Conversational Virtual Coach: Validation and User StudySensors10.3390/s2303142323:3(1423)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2023
  • (2023)Introducing multi-dimensional hierarchical classification: Characterization, solving strategies and performance measuresNeurocomputing10.1016/j.neucom.2023.02.050533(141-160)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2022)Perspectives on Socially Intelligent Conversational AgentsMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti60800626:8(62)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2022
  • (2022)Automatic Identification of Emotional Information in Spanish TV Debates and Human–Machine InteractionsApplied Sciences10.3390/app1204190212:4(1902)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2022
  • (2022)A Multilingual Neural Coaching Model with Enhanced Long-term Dialogue StructureACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems10.1145/348706612:2(1-47)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2022
  • (2022)User-Centred Usability Evaluation of Embodied Communication Agents to Support Older Adults: A Scoping ReviewInformation Technology and Systems10.1007/978-3-030-96293-7_42(509-518)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2022
  • (2021)Emotional Features of Interactions with Empathic Agents2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (ICCVW)10.1109/ICCVW54120.2021.00246(2168-2176)Online publication date: Oct-2021
  • (2021)Perceptual Borderline for Balancing Multi-Class Spontaneous Emotional DataIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2021.30714859(55939-55954)Online publication date: 2021
  • (2021)Other Advanced Research Initiatives in Elderly Care and Fragility PreventionDigital Health Technology for Better Aging10.1007/978-3-030-72663-8_20(327-359)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2021
  • (2020) Transfer learning in hierarchical dialogue topic classification with neural networks * 2020 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)10.1109/IJCNN48605.2020.9206680(1-8)Online publication date: Jul-2020
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