EMPATHIC: Empathic, Expressive, Advanced Virtual Coach to Improve Independent Healthy-Life-Years of the Elderly

The EMPATHIC project will research, innovate, explore and validate 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. Innovative multimodal face analytics, adaptive spoken dialogue systems and natural language interfaces are part of what the project will research and innovate, in order to help dependent aging persons and their carers. The project will use remote non-intrusive technologies to extract physiological markers of emotional states in real-time for online adaptive responses of the coach, and advance holistic modelling of behavioural, computational, physical and social aspects of a personalised expressive virtual coach. It will develop 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