Interaction with a Virtual Coach for Active and Healthy Ageing

Michael McTear; Kristiina Jokinen; Mirza Mohtashim Alam; Qasid Saleem; Giulio Napolitano; Florian Szczepaniak; Mossaab Hariz; Gérard Chollet; Christophe Lohr; Jérôme Boudy; Zohre Azimi; Sonja Dana Roelen; Rainer Wieching

doi:10.3390/s23052748

Interaction with a Virtual Coach for Active and Healthy Ageing

Michael McTear, Kristiina Jokinen, Mirza Mohtashim Alam, Qasid Saleem, Giulio Napolitano, Florian Szczepaniak, Mossaab Hariz, Gérard Chollet, Christophe Lohr, Jérôme Boudy, Zohre Azimi, Sonja Dana Roelen, Rainer Wieching

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)

58 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Since life expectancy has increased significantly over the past century, society is being forced to discover innovative ways to support active aging and elderly care. The e-VITA project, which receives funding from both the European Union and Japan, is built on a cutting edge method of virtual coaching that focuses on the key areas of active and healthy aging. The requirements for the virtual coach were ascertained through a process of participatory design in workshops, focus groups, and living laboratories in Germany, France, Italy, and Japan. Several use cases were then chosen for development utilising the open-source Rasa framework. The system uses common representations such as Knowledge Bases and Knowledge Graphs to enable the integration of context, subject expertise, and multimodal data, and is available in English, German, French, Italian, and Japanese.

Original language	English
Article number	2748
Pages (from-to)	1-17
Number of pages	17
Journal	Sensors
Volume	23
Issue number	5
Early online date	2 Mar 2023
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.3390/s23052748
Publication status	Published online - 2 Mar 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
With life expectancy increasing dramatically over the last century, societies are becoming increasingly confronted with new difficulties associated with an ageing population and the need to develop smart living solutions for the care of older adults and the promotion of active and healthy ageing []. This paper describes an innovative virtual coaching technique that is presently being developed in a three-year joint European (H2020) and Japanese (MIC) research project []. The e-VITA project has received funding from the European Union H2020 Programme under grant agreement no. 101016453. The Japanese consortium received funding from the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication (MIC), Grant no. JPJ000595. With the objective of enabling older persons to better manage their own health and daily activities, the virtual coach provides support and motivation in the critical areas of active and healthy ageing in cognition, physical activity, mobility, mood, social interaction, leisure, and spirituality. This will lead to greater well-being and enhanced stakeholder engagement. The virtual coach will provide individualized profiling and personalized recommendations based on big data analytics and social-emotional computing, detecting risks in the user’s daily living environment by collecting data from external sources and non-intrusive sensors, and providing support through natural interactions with 3D-holograms, emotional objects, or robotic technologies using multimodal and spoken dialogue technology, and advanced Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Base research. Ref. [] presents a summary of the project in general.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 by the authors.

Keywords

active and healthy ageing
dialogue system
knowledge sources
sensors
participatory design
Article

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Access to Document

10.3390/s23052748

sensors-23-02748 (2)Final published version, 1.04 MBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

@article{f75b0e721e3741668ffe0993272db8bd,

title = "Interaction with a Virtual Coach for Active and Healthy Ageing",

abstract = "Since life expectancy has increased significantly over the past century, society is being forced to discover innovative ways to support active aging and elderly care. The e-VITA project, which receives funding from both the European Union and Japan, is built on a cutting edge method of virtual coaching that focuses on the key areas of active and healthy aging. The requirements for the virtual coach were ascertained through a process of participatory design in workshops, focus groups, and living laboratories in Germany, France, Italy, and Japan. Several use cases were then chosen for development utilising the open-source Rasa framework. The system uses common representations such as Knowledge Bases and Knowledge Graphs to enable the integration of context, subject expertise, and multimodal data, and is available in English, German, French, Italian, and Japanese.",

keywords = "active and healthy ageing, dialogue system, knowledge sources, sensors, participatory design, Article",

author = "Michael McTear and Kristiina Jokinen and Alam, {Mirza Mohtashim} and Qasid Saleem and Giulio Napolitano and Florian Szczepaniak and Mossaab Hariz and G{\'e}rard Chollet and Christophe Lohr and J{\'e}r{\^o}me Boudy and Zohre Azimi and Roelen, {Sonja Dana} and Rainer Wieching",

note = "Funding Information: With life expectancy increasing dramatically over the last century, societies are becoming increasingly confronted with new difficulties associated with an ageing population and the need to develop smart living solutions for the care of older adults and the promotion of active and healthy ageing []. This paper describes an innovative virtual coaching technique that is presently being developed in a three-year joint European (H2020) and Japanese (MIC) research project []. The e-VITA project has received funding from the European Union H2020 Programme under grant agreement no. 101016453. The Japanese consortium received funding from the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication (MIC), Grant no. JPJ000595. With the objective of enabling older persons to better manage their own health and daily activities, the virtual coach provides support and motivation in the critical areas of active and healthy ageing in cognition, physical activity, mobility, mood, social interaction, leisure, and spirituality. This will lead to greater well-being and enhanced stakeholder engagement. The virtual coach will provide individualized profiling and personalized recommendations based on big data analytics and social-emotional computing, detecting risks in the user{\textquoteright}s daily living environment by collecting data from external sources and non-intrusive sensors, and providing support through natural interactions with 3D-holograms, emotional objects, or robotic technologies using multimodal and spoken dialogue technology, and advanced Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Base research. Ref. [] presents a summary of the project in general. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2023 by the authors.",

year = "2023",

month = mar,

day = "2",

doi = "10.3390/s23052748",

language = "English",

volume = "23",

pages = "1--17",

journal = "Sensors",

issn = "1424-8220",

publisher = "MDPI",

number = "5",

}

TY - JOUR

T1 - Interaction with a Virtual Coach for Active and Healthy Ageing

AU - McTear, Michael

AU - Jokinen, Kristiina

AU - Alam, Mirza Mohtashim

AU - Saleem, Qasid

AU - Napolitano, Giulio

AU - Szczepaniak, Florian

AU - Hariz, Mossaab

AU - Chollet, Gérard

AU - Lohr, Christophe

AU - Boudy, Jérôme

AU - Azimi, Zohre

AU - Roelen, Sonja Dana

AU - Wieching, Rainer

N1 - Funding Information: With life expectancy increasing dramatically over the last century, societies are becoming increasingly confronted with new difficulties associated with an ageing population and the need to develop smart living solutions for the care of older adults and the promotion of active and healthy ageing []. This paper describes an innovative virtual coaching technique that is presently being developed in a three-year joint European (H2020) and Japanese (MIC) research project []. The e-VITA project has received funding from the European Union H2020 Programme under grant agreement no. 101016453. The Japanese consortium received funding from the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication (MIC), Grant no. JPJ000595. With the objective of enabling older persons to better manage their own health and daily activities, the virtual coach provides support and motivation in the critical areas of active and healthy ageing in cognition, physical activity, mobility, mood, social interaction, leisure, and spirituality. This will lead to greater well-being and enhanced stakeholder engagement. The virtual coach will provide individualized profiling and personalized recommendations based on big data analytics and social-emotional computing, detecting risks in the user’s daily living environment by collecting data from external sources and non-intrusive sensors, and providing support through natural interactions with 3D-holograms, emotional objects, or robotic technologies using multimodal and spoken dialogue technology, and advanced Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Base research. Ref. [] presents a summary of the project in general. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 by the authors.

PY - 2023/3/2

Y1 - 2023/3/2

N2 - Since life expectancy has increased significantly over the past century, society is being forced to discover innovative ways to support active aging and elderly care. The e-VITA project, which receives funding from both the European Union and Japan, is built on a cutting edge method of virtual coaching that focuses on the key areas of active and healthy aging. The requirements for the virtual coach were ascertained through a process of participatory design in workshops, focus groups, and living laboratories in Germany, France, Italy, and Japan. Several use cases were then chosen for development utilising the open-source Rasa framework. The system uses common representations such as Knowledge Bases and Knowledge Graphs to enable the integration of context, subject expertise, and multimodal data, and is available in English, German, French, Italian, and Japanese.

AB - Since life expectancy has increased significantly over the past century, society is being forced to discover innovative ways to support active aging and elderly care. The e-VITA project, which receives funding from both the European Union and Japan, is built on a cutting edge method of virtual coaching that focuses on the key areas of active and healthy aging. The requirements for the virtual coach were ascertained through a process of participatory design in workshops, focus groups, and living laboratories in Germany, France, Italy, and Japan. Several use cases were then chosen for development utilising the open-source Rasa framework. The system uses common representations such as Knowledge Bases and Knowledge Graphs to enable the integration of context, subject expertise, and multimodal data, and is available in English, German, French, Italian, and Japanese.

KW - active and healthy ageing

KW - dialogue system

KW - knowledge sources

KW - sensors

KW - participatory design

KW - Article

UR - https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/23/5/2748

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85149800826&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.3390/s23052748

DO - 10.3390/s23052748

M3 - Article

C2 - 36904957

SN - 1424-8220

VL - 23

SP - 1

EP - 17

JO - Sensors

JF - Sensors

IS - 5

M1 - 2748

ER -

Interaction with a Virtual Coach for Active and Healthy Ageing

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

UN SDGs

Access to Document

Other files and links

Fingerprint

Cite this