COUCH
COUCH will design, develop and evaluate a Virtual Coaching System (VCS) targeted at older adults that are undergoing life changing events that have a potential negative impact on physical, cognitive, mental, and/or social well-being as well as elderly users suffering from Diabetes or Chronic Pain.
The virtual coach system is manifested as a group of virtual characters: a council where each member represents a different knowledge domain. Coaching sessions consist of an interactive group discussion between the user and several members of the council, in which the user and his behaviors are the main topic of discussion. The project will emphasize deep character design based on sound theories from the video game and film worlds.
The project will combine smart multimodal sensing technologies to seamlessly and opportunistically measure and model the user behavior in a comprehensive fashion, including physical, cognitive, mental and social aspects. In order to sense psychological information, the project introduces the concept of the coach-as-a-sensor. Through the use of interactive dialogues, the coach will obtain this knowledge by engaging in interactions with the user.
COUCH will develop an ecosystem of services, along with a community of healthcare services providers. It will develop the council of coaches on the principles of a generic coaching framework that builds upon and extends existing platforms such as FIWARE and universAAL to provide a set of protocols and definitions for generic, interchangeable virtual coaching modules.
ITACA-SABIEN
Will participate in the integration efforts that will bring all subsystems together to build up the COUCH prototype, and then the finalized overall system. We will also deal with integrations within the universAAL and FIWARE platforms, as well as with sensors and other IoT-related modules. We will help with dissemination of the results and the relationships with open platform communities.